Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (15 page)

25
                  
ANOTHER MAN DOWN IN PARIS

PARIS, ACROSS FROM THE MADELEINE CHURCH FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 1973, 2100H

Dr. Basil Al-Kubaisi’s file was one of the thickest in Caesarea’s system. It was crammed with intelligence bulletins, evaluations, plans, memos, notes. A black-and-white photo of Al-Kubaisi in a dark suit hung inside chief intelligence officer R.’s cabinet. The Mossad had identified the man as a clever and evasive
saya’an.
Despite his role in lethal terror attacks, he remained a soft target: he visited European cities, had no security guard, and kept to a semipredictable routine. Several Caesarea surveillance teams had been trailing Al-Kubaisi since December 1972. He visited Paris regularly, in love with the City of Light. He would stay for a few days, take no obvious measures to avoid surveillance, and then vanish. Days later, the Facha division would learn from gathered intelligence that Al-Kubaisi was planning to return to Paris. The surveillance crews would be dispatched once again to trail him, only to be stymied yet again. The game of cat and (blithely unaware) mouse continued for three months. At the time it was one of Caesarea’s longest ongoing missions.

Dr. Basil Al-Kubaisi, forty, had a perfectly manicured mustache and soft eyes. He looked incapable of committing the sorts of crimes the Mossad accused him of. An Iraqi, he was a left-wing law professor who believed in Pan-Arabism and sided with the Palestinian cause for ideological reasons. He was probably not affiliated with Fatah’s Black September and certainly had no hand in the Munich Massacre. There was nothing extreme in his appearance; his clothes were fit for the academy, he was elegant and well kempt. But according to Branch 4 and the Mossad’s intelligence, he helped the PFLP smuggle weapons and explosives for Western European terror attacks, slipping across borders and past customs officials without arousing suspicion. Raw intelligence data implied that his involvement in terrorism stretched back to the days of the Iraqi monarchy. In 1956, Al-Kubaisi was allegedly involved in a plot to kill King Faisal with a booby-trapped car, positioned along the king’s route. A delay in the monarch’s convoy saved the king’s life, but forced Al-Kubaisi to flee Iraq. He made it to Beirut and from there to America and then Canada, where he received his doctorate in international law.

In 1971, Al-Kubaisi returned to the Middle East. Denied entry to his homeland, he took up residence in the then cosmopolitan hub of the Levant, Beirut, teaching law at the American University and affiliating himself with the PFLP. Various sources in the PFLP claimed that Al-Kubaisi was involved in the planning of a string of attacks along America’s eastern seaboard. On March
6, 1973,
Al-Kubaisi allegedly aided and assisted a PFLP team that placed a car packed with explosives close to the El Al terminal at New York’s JFK Airport on the day that Golda Meir was due to land. The car was discovered before her arrival. Intelligence data also showed him to be a senior member of George Habash’s PFLP and one of the planners of the attack at Lod Airport in 1972. Israeli Military Intelligence, the Mossad, and Aharon Yariv believed that the amassed intelligence before them warranted Al-Kubaisi’s death. He had a terrorist past, a terrorist present, and in all likelihood a terrorist future. All agreed that liquidating the talented
saya’an
would prevent future attacks and send the required message to those devoted to the terrorist cause. It was time for him to meet his maker. Prime Minister Golda Meir and the defense cabinet authorized the mission.

In early April 1973, Caesarea’s surveillance crews caught up with Al-Kubaisi in a small Parisian hotel adjacent to the lovely Madeleine Church. The surveillance teams had studied his daily routine, recording his every move, and Caesarea’s “Senate,” their forward command center in Europe, had rushed to complete an assassination plan. After seven months of intensive action in the field, Caesarea’s surveillance and hit teams were in good form—professional and quick. Their hands-on experience kept the tension low and their guard up at all times. The mission was set for April 6. Mike Harari and Zvi Zamir arrived in Paris that afternoon, heading straight to their command room in a Mossad safe house. All the preparations had been made; all remaining decisions were in the hands of the two assassins and the one field commander closing in on Al-Kubaisi.

At sunset, the surveillance crew reported that the subject had finished eating at the upscale Café de la Paix. He left the restaurant, bought a newspaper, and began walking toward his hotel, down one of the side streets next to the Madeleine Church. Al-Kubaisi made a detour, spending close to an hour with a local prostitute. When he emerged, two assassins approached him, rapidly closing the gap between them. Al-Kubaisi had time to yell, in French, “
Non, ne faites pas cela!
No, don’t do this!” before they opened fire, shooting him nine times from close range with their silenced Beretta
0.22
pistols. Al-Kubaisi collapsed in front of the corner pharmacy, dying alone on Paris’s Rue Chauveau Lagarde.

George Habash’s PFLP published a death announcement for Dr. Basil Al-Kubaisi, declaring him a
shahid,
his murder a Zionist crime committed by Israeli intelligence. The announcement also blamed French authorities for their complicity in allowing the Zionists to operate unhindered on French soil. “This type of behavior on the part of the French authorities forces us to see the French government as collaborators with extremists, who operate against the interests of the Palestinian nation,” it proclaimed. A search of Al-Kubaisi’s hotel room turned up nine different passports and $
1,000
in foreign currency. Harari’s three assassination teams had now knocked off four Palestinians—second-and third-tier Fatah members, suspected
saya’an
s of Black September and the PFLP.

Mike Harari’s safe in Caesarea’s Tel Aviv headquarters contained a list with at least a dozen names on it. All were terrorists suspected of involvement in the Munich Massacre or other devastating attacks and included Palestinian leaders such as: Abu-Iyad, Fatah’s second in command; Abu-Daoud, the architect of the Munich Massacre; Fakhri Al-Omri and Atef Bseiso, Abu-Iyad’s operations officers; and, last but not least, Ali Hassan Salameh, a senior commander of Fatah.

Seven months after the Munich Massacre the priorities of Israel’s intelligence agencies were firmly fixed. Their primary task was to warn of imminent attacks against Israeli targets in Europe and Israel. Their secondary priority was to supply field teams with the operational intelligence needed to plan and execute assassination missions. The intelligence poured in, but information pertaining to the men on the hit list remained weak and unreliable. Branch 4 and the Mossad’s Facha division were still groping in the dark, but a massive effort to draft a HUMINT source within Black September was under way. It was clear to all that just one source could turn the tide.

The blacklisted men knew they were being hunted by Israel. Prime Minister Meir had declared as much from the Knesset’s podium. Abu-Iyad and his comrades and Ali Hassan Salameh had to be protected, careful, alert, and armed to the teeth if they were to survive. Most of them feared leaving Beirut, where they felt relatively safe.

26
                  
OPERATION SPRING OF YOUTH

BEIRUT, SANDS BEACH MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1973, 0030H

Major Amnon Biran, Sayeret Matkal’s chief intelligence officer, put on an overcoat and climbed to the deck of the Israeli missile boat
Ga’ash.
The cold, wind-driven salt spray stung his face as he stared across the water at the twinkling lights of Beirut two miles away. Sixteen commandos were on the ground, operating deep in enemy territory. Neither he nor any of the senior officers on board had heard a word from them in over fifteen minutes. They had slipped off sleek rubber boats on a Lebanese beach, radioed in their first codeword, and then gone silent.

The Sayeret Matkal commandos planned to assassinate three top-level Fatah officers in their bedrooms, in the heart of Beirut. It was Israel’s most audacious counterterrorism mission to date. The intended message: “Our reach is long. We can find you anywhere.” The motive: deterrence, prevention, revenge.

The view from the ship’s deck was grim. Major Biran paced the confined space, alternating his gaze between the waves and the bright lights of the city. Months of poring over maps and aerial photographs had helped him pinpoint a certain cluster of lights in the northwest corner of the city—in a few minutes the force should be there. But the silence irked him. They should have radioed in several codewords by now, signaling their advance through the city. Suddenly a trail of tracers cut through the night. He took a deep breath of concern: at least the teams had reached the right area. But why the tracer fire? Were they engaged in a firefight with the Lebanese army? His discomfort intensified.

The three targeted men were Muhammad Yussef Najar, forty-four, one of the founders and the current second in command of Fatah, known as Abu-Yussef, and a lawyer by training; Kamal Adwan, thirty-eight, a petroleum engineer and commander of the relatively new Western Wing, the Fatah division charged with attacks on Israeli soil; and Kamal Nasser, forty-eight, a Palestinian Christian who served as the PLO’s chief spokesman. A talented poet, he was both charismatic and popular. The three lived next to one another, in two tall buildings in northwest Beirut, in the a-Sir neighborhood.

Abu-Yussef and Adwan were tied to terrorist operations against Israel since 1968. Several loose, uncorroborated strands of information even linked the two of them with Black September and the Munich attack. Undoubtedly, both were up to their necks in terrorist activity. Their planned assassination was mostly preventive in nature. The necessity and legitimacy of targeting the third man, Kamal Nasser, the spokesman, was debated for weeks. In the end, he was sentenced to death because Military Intelligence considered him an ideologue who sanctified and promoted the killing of innocent Israelis—and because the PLO lacked a clear distinction between its political and operational branches. According to Military Intelligence, the PLO’s political activists, primarily in Europe, assisted terror attacks. They were legitimate targets.

Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak, future prime minister of Israel, commander of Sayeret Matkal at the time, led his men toward their targets in West Beirut. Over the past two years, he had been pushing the brass for more counterterrorism operations. The different elite forces of the IDF were all steeped in an unspoken yet competitive race to see who could pull off the most daring operation. This one began on a small pad of paper. Barak heard rumors in early 1973 that the IDF’s Joint Chiefs were considering a mission deep in Beirut. He sent Major Biran to find out more. Biran poked around his contacts at the Mossad and learned that the brass was looking to locate several top-level Fatah targets in the Lebanese capital. A Mossad officer ripped a piece of paper out of a notepad and sketched the location of the homes of Abu-Yussef, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser. For Sayeret Matkal, known in Israel simply as the Unit, that was how the mission began.

In early February, Barak called his senior officers to a meeting. Yoni Netanyahu, older brother to future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and deputy commander of the Unit at the time, sat next to Major Muki Betzer, Major Biran, and Lieutenant Amitai Nachmani. The five of them looked closely at the black and white photos of Abu-Yussef, Kamal Nasser, and Kamal Adwan. Major Biran recited the terrorist biographies of the three, as he had received them from above. He unfurled an aerial map of Beirut. “Here,” he said, pointing to the a-Sir neighborhood, “on Vardun Street, just beyond the American and British embassies and the luxury seaside hotels, in these two tall buildings.” Everyone clustered around the map. There wasn’t much to say. A lot of intelligence work had to be done before they could start on an operational plan.

Since the “Black September” of 1970, when Jordan’s King Hussein’s forces killed thousands of Palestinians and forced the survivors to flee, Beirut had become the home of many Palestinian terrorist organizations. Thousands of operatives from Fatah, and the left-wing organizations of George Habash, Naif Hawatmeh, and Ahmed Jibril, freely roamed the streets of the Lebanese capital. Neither their threat to Lebanese sovereignty nor the rule of law made much impression on them: weapons were slung casually over their shoulders. Outside their offices, where terrorist operations in Europe and Israel were planned, heavily fortified guard positions were set up, with machine guns and concrete blocks.

The Palestinians were not Beirut’s only guests. The city had become a mecca of sorts for mostly left-wing international terror organizations. The West German Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades, the ASALA, and the Japanese Red Army all had scores of operatives in the city. They attended training camps and seminars. They were all part of a bizarre metropolis where bars and casinos stayed open all night, girls in bathing suits sunbathed on the beach, muezzins summoned the faithful to prayer five times a day, and terrorists gathered in alleyways.

Beirut was a factory for terrorism. The Sabena, Lod, Bangkok, and Munich attacks had been planned and supervised from high-rise apartments in the high-income areas of the city. Organization heads wove intricate attack plans and did not hide their activities.

Operation Spring of Youth began with Caesarea. The Mossad unit’s combatants went into the field early, undercover, to collect intelligence for the Unit. They photographed the apartment buildings, filmed the street at all hours of the day and night, checked the traffic routes to and from the buildings, and observed everyday life in the neighborhood. The hundreds of hours of surveillance work would hopefully translate into half an hour of meticulously executed action.

The first question planners needed to answer: how to transport Barak’s troops to Beirut, a one-million-person coastal city seventy-five miles north of Israel’s border? Helicopters were ruled out almost immediately as too overt and dangerous. The sea proved a better option. Major Muki Betzer boarded an Israeli navy submarine to reconnoiter a five-mile stretch of beach along Beirut’s south shore.

Biran pinpointed the beach of the Sands Hotel as a workable landing spot for the team. The benefit of landing on a private beach was obvious—no camping, no couples, and no fishermen. The downside was that the better rooms had balconies overlooking the sea. A late night cigarette on the balcony could lead to disaster. Caesarea’s combatants observed the beachfront hotel for many nights and found that the chilly March winds, carrying grains of salt and sand, kept the hotel guests inside at night. The balconies were empty, the blinds drawn. Biran knew he could proceed.

The reports arrived in a steady stream. Caesarea’s undercover combatants learned the layout of the lobby, the design of the staircases, and the number of stairs on each landing. They checked the schedule of the concierge to see when he would likely be at his post. They reported back to Tel Aviv how many guards typically manned the front doors. Biran investigated the Beirut police: how many policemen were on night duty across the city, how many would respond to a call in that part of town, with how many vehicles, in what time frame, and with what degree of professionalism.

The plan was remarkable. The chosen commandos would sail to Beirut on missile boats. Two miles offshore they would transfer to the naval commandos’ Mark 7 rubber rafts, which would silently slide onto the shore. Three Caesarea reserves officers, posing as Canadian and European tourists, would wait in large American cars in the hotel’s parking lot, their five-mile route committed to memory. “Our intention,” said Major Betzer, deputy commander of the mission, “was to finish the mission as quickly as possible and avoid a small war in the streets of Beirut.”

Betzer had been carrying a small, passport-size picture in his shirt pocket for the two weeks prior to the mission. Biran had given him the photo. He studied the lean face of Abu-Yussef at every opportunity—when all hell broke loose in the apartment, amidst the screaming and the sting of sweat in his eyes, he would recognize his target immediately. Once he’d pulled the trigger he would have one more opportunity to verify his target: Abu-Yussef was missing the pinkie finger of his left hand. The others carried similar photos.

The Unit’s top fifteen commandos were picked for the mission. A sixteenth, Yoni Netanyahu (who would be killed three years later leading the daring rescue mission at Entebbe), joined at the last minute. Their practice drills mirrored the real thing. They got into rubber boats, motored to shore, docked, piled into cars, sat in their exact positions, and drove for five miles. They unloaded at two high-rise buildings in north Tel Aviv. The neighborhood was still under construction and had been commandeered at night by the army under false pretenses. The warriors split into four teams. Three went up to their assigned apartments, and one, under the command of Barak, remained on the street as a forward command center. They practiced the quick entry steps into the lobby and then watched one another’s backs in a coordinated dancelike sprint up winding flights of stairs, guns aimed upwards, counting the floors as they climbed. Kamal Adwan lived on the second floor, Kamal Nasser on the third, and Abu-Yussef on the sixth floor of the neighboring building.

Lieutenant General David Elazar, the IDF chief of staff, came to observe the team’s drills in north Tel Aviv. After watching a full rehearsal, he pulled Barak aside. “Look, Ehud,” he said, “it doesn’t look good. You guys will be tourists in civilian clothes, but all these men, at one-thirty in the morning? Their security guards are going to notice you guys, it’s too suspicious . . . think of something else.”

Barak, and Betzer, who was listening in, knew he was correct. It didn’t look right. Elazar leaned in and said, “What if some of you came dressed as women?” Betzer liked the idea immediately. He turned to Barak and said, “Yeah, Ehud, let’s dress up as couples. We’ll walk spread out in pairs.”

Betzer set himself to the task. The shortest warriors would wear the drag. Barak would be the hot brunette, Lonny Rafael and Amiram Levine, a future IDF general and deputy head of the Mossad, would be blondes.

The warriors carried all their weapons and explosives under their jackets and on their belts, or, in the case of the “ladies,” in their fashionable purses and under their brassieres. During another dry run, Muki Betzer, a broad-shouldered man in a suit two sizes too big for him, walked hand in hand with Barak, the brunette, to the entrance of the building. Afterward Lieutenant General Elazar approached Betzer and felt his jacket, asking, “What do you have on under here?”

“Four grenades on my belt, an Ingram submachine gun under one arm, a Beretta under the other arm, and eight magazines, with thirty bullets each in these pockets,” Betzer replied, showing an array of tailored pockets sewn into his suit. Elazar nodded.

Each warrior understood that if something went wrong with the plan, they were alone. No cavalry would come to Beirut. One night, after a long day of practice, Betzer gathered the three other men in his team. “We’re going on an unusual mission, in the heart of a bustling city. There’ll be guards at the doors to the place. The terrorists will be armed. There’ll be lots of unarmed civilians around us. What we need to focus on is Najar; he needs to pay for his sins.” Betzer paused. “If we do as we’ve planned, we’ll leave the city in one piece. It’s true, anything could happen, but we’ll stay calm, confident, and clearheaded. Each problem has a solution.” Finally, feeling he needed to hammer home the point of the mission, Betzer added: “This is the first time we are attacking an enemy with a name, not some unknown adversary with a weapon. As far as the state of Israel is concerned, these three guys have committed war crimes. This is revenge for Munich. We need them to feel our anger, and to fear us.”

Three days before the mission began the entire Fatah leadership met in Kamal Nasser’s apartment. Abu-Iyad, who years later revealed the meeting, noticed that there was no security outside the apartments of Abu-Yussef, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser. “You guys aren’t cautious enough; an Israeli helicopter is going to land here someday soon and kidnap you,” he said. All of them laughed, except for the preternaturally suspicious Arafat, who told them to hire security guards immediately. The night before the mission began, Abu-Iyad, the architect of Munich, slept not for the first time on Kamal Nasser’s couch.

Late Monday morning, April 9, the Unit’s sixteen warriors rolled up to the Haifa harbor on a bus packed with gear and weapons. IDF Chief of Staff Elazar and head of Military Intelligence Eli Zeira were waiting for them at the entrance to the harbor. They hopped on the bus and wished the fighters well. “All of a sudden I heard the Chief of Staff say ‘Kill the bastards,’” remembers Betzer. “None of us thought the terrorists would throw their hands in the air and surrender, but we practiced catching them, cuffing them, and transporting them to Israel. Deep down inside we knew that the chances of bringing them back as prisoners were slim and that in truth the brass didn’t really intend for us to do that, but the Chief of Staff’s utterance was more explicit than usual.”