Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (21 page)

31
                  
OVERSEAS TERRORISM GRINDS TO A HALT

EAST GERMAN HOSPITAL
FRIDAY, MARCH 30, 1978

Dr. Wadi Haddad, the international man of terror responsible for dozens of airline hijackings and other earthshaking attacks against Israeli, American, and European targets the world over, died a slow, painful death in a grim East German hospital. The Palestinian doctor flew to Germany from Iraq, terminally ill. Once a fat man, he was now weak and emaciated, confined to his bed, waiting out his days. He died on March
30, 1978,
only forty-eight years old.

The few dozen loyalists who had left the PFLP with Haddad were hard-pressed to explain the riddle of his torturous death. He died of an unknown terminal disease that attacked and debilitated his immune system. They could not be certain if his death was natural or induced. His more imaginative friends believed that Haddad’s Iraqi patron, the ominous Vice President Saddam Hussein, had the doctor secretly poisoned once he was no longer useful to that regime. As always, some saw the hand of the Mossad in Haddad’s death, claiming poisoning, but lacking any proof. Over the years the conspiracy theories dissipated and only the bitter fact of his inexplicable end remained. The bachelor, having amassed riches from years of terrorist activity, left millions of dollars to his sister.

For years Israel kept silent on the matter. Now it is possible to reveal that Dr. Haddad died an unnatural death. Poison was slipped into his food. The Mossad had sought to kill him ever since they learned that he was the mastermind behind hijackings carried out by the PFLP. They figured assassination was the only way to stop further deadly plans.

Haddad was a prolific and skilled terrorist. He was the first to hijack an El Al plane, on July
23, 1968.
After weeks of captivity, Israel, headed at the time by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, freed Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the hostages—the first and last time the Israeli government would ever bow to terrorist extortion. That El Al hijacking was the first in a series of plane hijackings designed to raise the profile of the Palestinian predicament. In September 1970, Dr. George Habash, the leader of the PFLP, the Marxist Palestinian terror organization that he founded along with Haddad, flew to North Korea on business. While he was away, Haddad had five planes hijacked. They were flown to Jordan, emptied, and then exploded for the cameras.

His operatives hijacked a Lufthansa flight en route from New Delhi, India, to Germany, forcing it to land in Aden, Yemen. Lufthansa paid several million dollars ransom for the plane and the passengers. Detractors of the supposedly Marxist terrorist claimed that Haddad deposited some $1 million in his own account. He was responsible for the PFLP’s relationship with international terrorist organizations in Europe, Asia, and South America, offering them training facilities in Lebanon and strengthening their ties. One result: the Marxist Japanese Red Army attack at Lod Airport in 1972.

Haddad and his followers left the mainstream of the PFLP after that bold-headline attack, quarreling over the necessity of overseas terrorism. In October 1972 his men carried out the dubious Lufthansa hijacking that secured the freedom of the three surviving Munich terrorists. Determined to continue carrying out high-profile attacks outside Israel, his men were responsible for a December
21, 1975,
attack on OPEC headquarters in Vienna and a late June 1976 hijacking of an Air France flight on its way from Israel.

Haddad was also willing to assist other terrorist organizations. In late February 1973, still living in Beirut, Haddad was asked by his good friend Abu-Iyad to falsify entry visas to Sudan, facilitating the attack on the embassy in Khartoum. Haddad created the visas in his print workshop within six hours.

Finally, on June
28, 1976,
Haddad’s men, with the assistance of the German Baader-Meinhof Gang, hijacked an Air France Airbus 747 en route from Israel to Paris, forcing the plane to land in Entebbe, Uganda. On July
4, 1976,
the American Bicentennial, the hostage situation was resolved by a team of Israeli commandos led by Sayeret Matkal. Several Hercules C
-130
cargo planes flew over one thousand miles beyond Israel’s borders and landed in Entebbe. Once safely on the ground, the lead team of commandos proceeded to the terminal. Dressed to resemble the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and his entourage, and riding in the type of black Mercedes he favored, the team from Sayeret Matkal drove to the terminal, stormed the passenger hall, and rescued the stunned hostages.

Entebbe was the last straw. The Mossad and Military Intelligence upgraded the importance of assassinating Dr. Wadi Haddad after the victorious mission. Haddad, however, resided in Baghdad and rarely traveled, complicating their work. In the spring of 1977, nearly one year after Entebbe, it was clear that the mountain would not come to Muhammad; the Mossad decided to bring Muhammad to the mountain. An assassination plan took shape and was authorized by newly inaugurated Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Dr. Haddad had a weak point: his sweet tooth. The man loved good chocolate, Belgian chocolate, particularly; Tzomet, the human intelligence collection arm of the Mossad, was keen to capitalize on that weakness. The plan called for a reliable Palestinian agent, a member of Dr. Haddad’s organization, to bring the doctor a gift of Belgian chocolates upon return from travels in Europe. The valuable gift, unattainable in Iraq in those years, was coated by Mossad specialists with a lethal biological poison. Tzomet had good reason to believe that the chocoholic would eat the creamy squares alone, unwilling to share the delectable gift. And so it was. The agent brought his boss the gift when he got back from Europe and the doctor gleefully devoured it—alone. Weeks later he began to lose weight. He lost his appetite. Blood tests showed that his immune system was compromised. It took him a few long months to die.

The faction under Dr. Wadi Haddad’s command collapsed after his death. Dry statistics indicate that the number of attacks against Israeli targets abroad plummeted with his passing. Israeli intelligence and, in particular, the Mossad, viewed this as further proof of the effectiveness of their assassination program. The intelligence community presented these facts and conclusions to the new prime minister, explaining that the bio-hit on Haddad was the very definition of a preventive assassination, eradicating a ticking bomb, a man with a fertile mind who never stopped planning the next attack.

Menachem Begin was pleased with the execution and results of the Haddad assassination, and authorized yet another elimination, one that Mossad members somewhat arrogantly referred to as “something we just picked up . . .”

The target was Zuhir Mokhsan, head of the pro-Syrian Palestinian terror organization A-Tzaika. His assassination, in the summer of 1979, was not particularly complicated, and didn’t require extensive intelligence gathering. Mokhsan, who did not take even minimal safety precautions, was shot on July
25, 1979,
by two assassins from Caesarea’s Kidon unit in the hallway of his apartment building in Cannes, on the French Riviera. Fatally injured, he died the next day at the Louis Pasteur Hospital in Nice. The French police announced that the murdered man had arrived in France with a Syrian diplomatic passport, claiming to have been born in Damascus. Mokhsan’s sudden death led to the dissolution of the A-Tzaika organization—another veritable well of terrorism gone dry.

The numbers show a steep slide in the frequency of terror attacks against Israelis and Israeli institutions abroad from 1974 to the present. At the end of the 1970s, top-ranking Israeli intelligence officials were in near unanimous agreement that Israel’s post-Munich wave of retaliatory and preventive assassinations gravely affected terrorist organizations, causing some to fold and others to limp. For Fatah and other groups that survived, the onslaught hindered their ability to function in Europe and deterred them from acting, forcing them to gradually abandon the idea of mega-attacks against Israeli targets abroad. That said, many in the Israeli intelligence community acknowledged that the Palestinians were also motivated by pragmatism. As time went on, the PLO realized that attacks outside Israel were doing their cause more harm than good.

On the Palestinian side, the leading consensus was to stand firm, which meant that the Mossad’s assassinations had not deterred them, as General Aharon Yariv and others at Israeli intelligence agencies believed—or wanted people to believe. The explanation for the drop and the eventual cessation of foreign attacks, rather, could be found in the Palestinians’ gradual transition from terrorism to political action and international diplomacy. This change peaked with Yasser Arafat’s speech at the United Nations in New York in 1974. The Palestinians had labored for international recognition—terrorism had been a part of that fight. Now they had it. There was no longer a need for international terrorism—and it could damage their image.

Most of the Israeli intelligence community remains convinced that their campaign forced an end to overseas terror.

32
                  
ALI HASSAN SALAMEH

BEIRUT, VERDUN ST.
MONDAY, JANUARY 22, 1979, 1535H

Ali Hassan Salameh was philosophical about the matter of his death, telling
Time
magazine, “They’re the ones who should be worried after all their mistakes. But I also know that when my number is up, it will be up. No one can stop it.”

It had been more than five years since Salameh had been directly involved in terrorism; even Black September, the name used by Fatah, was no longer active. But ever since the lethal blunder in Lillehammer, the urge to eliminate Salameh had been tied less to cold calculation and more to the human desire to right a historical wrong. For Mike Harari and Caesarea, so long as he lived and breathed, Ali Hassan Salameh was a testament to their great failure. That black stain could be erased only with his death.

Even in the immediate wake of the Lillehammer disaster, the intelligence gathering in the hunt for Salameh never stopped. R., Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, pored over thousands of raw intelligence briefs looking for the man’s Capture Point. Every relevant detail gleaned from the raw data was checked, analyzed, and filed.

Raw intelligence data showed that Salameh spent an inordinate amount of time practicing karate and pumping iron. He would go to the gym for hours at a time nearly every day. Undercover Caesarea combatants combed Beirut’s gyms, putting miles on nearly every treadmill in the beleaguered city until they found their man. The Mossad operatives watched him carefully, noticing that he always hit the sauna before the shower. Soon, Mossad staff officers crafted a plan to plant a bomb under a sauna bench. The plan was discarded. There was no way to ensure that others would not join him at the last instant in the sauna or that the club wouldn’t be severely damaged, perhaps putting more lives at risk.

Thousands of hours of manpower, in field and office, were devoted to the hunt for Salameh—it was one of Israeli intelligence’s longest and most costly missions. HUMINT sources were asked time and again about the man, their ability to get close to him, his schedule, his habits, and his plans. The ears of Military Intelligence, Unit 8200, were instructed to intercept his calls or pick up any mention of his name. A new Mossad computer system searched satellite communication systems for the words “Ali Hassan Salameh” or “Abu-Hassan,” recording all such conversations both in Israel and abroad. The Ali Hassan Salameh search, which was costly from a number of different perspectives, was a project the Mossad and Caesarea conducted with everything they had.

His name came up in covert meetings the Mossad conducted with Lebanese Christian Phalangist leaders, who were in close contact and even friendly with Salameh. They were asked very gently to keep the Mossad abreast of his actions. In March 1976, the Mossad held a secret meeting with Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Christian forces in Lebanon, and Military Intelligence officers in the seaside Israeli town of Herzaliya. The future president of Lebanon was asked to provide details of Salameh’s schedule and his daily routine. Gemayel promised to help, but his vow, like many of the Phalangists’ promises, was hollow. Fulfilling it promised no foreseeable benefit.

Ali Hassan Salameh was born in 1942, the firstborn child of Hassan Salameh, an important gang leader in British Palestine. His father was notorious for his murderous zeal during the Jewish-Arab riots in the 1930s. By 1939, after the fall of the Great Arab Revolt, he was forced to flee Palestine, an enormous £
10,000
bounty on his head. He traveled through Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon with his young wife before returning to Palestine. Two weeks after Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared independence, he fell in battle. A mortar shell pierced his lung as he led three hundred men in a charge on a village recently captured by Israel. He was thirty-seven.

Ali was only six years old when he lost his father. He lived with his mother, Um-Ali (“mother of Ali”), and two younger sisters, Nidal and Jihad, in Beirut. They lived in prosperity until Ali was sixteen and the family decided to leave tumultuous Lebanon—refugees a second time over. The young Ali Salameh had no interest in politics. He was rich, far removed from the people in the teeming Palestinian refugee camps around the Middle East longing for home and revenge.

He went to West Germany to study engineering. But studies were the least of his interests. Far from the eye of Um-Ali, he breathed in the best of what Europe had to offer—elegant restaurants, palatial hotels, glittery nightclubs. He was obsessive about fashion, wearing well-tailored, exclusively black suits. He liked the company of women, and they liked him. His good looks, Eastern charm, and hospitality worked like a honey trap for young German women. The playboy spent hours each day sculpting his body in the weight room and practicing karate, which he recommended to all.

In 1963, he abided by his mother’s wishes and returned to Egypt to marry a simple young woman from the respected Husseini clan. Within a year he had his first son—Hassan, bestowing the title Abu-Hassan. But neither the wedding nor the birth of a child altered the habits of the narcissistic Ali Hassan Salameh. He remained a respected member of Cairo’s party scene, reveling in the city’s posh nightclubs till the early hours of the morning.

In 1976, at the height of his power and influence in Fatah, Salameh agreed to his only press interview. Speaking with Nadia Salti Stephan in Beirut, he spoke of growing up in the shadow of his father.

“The influence of my father has posed a personal problem for me. I grew up in a family that considered ‘struggle’ a matter of heritage which should be carried on by generation after generation . . . . My father was not the only one in the family to give his life for Palestine: some twelve young men in my family, mostly cousins, died in the 1940s. My upbringing was politicized. I
lived
the Palestinian cause . . . . When my father fell as a martyr, Palestine was passed on to me, so to speak. My mother wanted me to be another Hassan Salameh . . . . This had a tremendous impacton me. I wanted to be myself . . . . Even as a child, I had to follow a certain pattern of behavior . . . . I was made constantly conscious of the fact that I was the son of Hassan Salameh and had to live up to that.”

Abu-Hassan joined the PLO prior to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—a result of Israel’s crushing victory in the Six Day War in June 1967. As a protégé of Arafat’s, Salameh rose through the ranks with ease. The leader of the PLO saw him as kin, preferred not to notice Salameh’s self-indulgent lifestyle, and appointed him commander of his personal guard, Force 17, apparently so named after the extension number in the PLO’s headquarters in Beirut. Salameh spent as much time as he could with the
ra’is.
As son of the Palestinian Hassan Salameh, the
shahid
who had lost his life in battle against the Zionists, Ali wanted to go far.

When Ali Hassan Salameh was sitting for his interview, Israeli intelligence continued to grasp at straws. The civil war that erupted in Lebanon in 1975 worked both for and against the Mossad. On the one hand, deteriorating federal power made getting in and out of Beirut simple. On the other hand, the combatants were exposed to great risk in a lawless city with no rules and no judges, a regular rain of artillery and mortar fire, and the all-too-frequent sound of snipers’ bullets. The risk of catching a stray or well-aimed sniper bullet, or of simply being mistaken for a tourist and mugged at gunpoint, perhaps taken for ransom, was too great. Many assassination plans went unfinished. Even innovative and elegant operations were sidelined out of concern for the combatants’ safety. Most of the plans to kill Ali Hassan Salameh in the chaos of Beirut stopped at Mike Harari’s door.

After Spring of Youth, Salameh had grown cautious about his personal safety, hiring dozens of armed security guards. In the aforementioned interview, Salameh was unsparing in his criticism of the three men slain during that operation. “The enemy’s main victory—the assassination of three of our leaders in Beirut in April
1973—
was the result of complete carelessness, which is typical of the Eastern mentality, the fatalistic mentality. My home was about fifty meters from the late Abu-Yussef’s home. The Israeli assassins didn’t come to my home for a very simple reason: it was guarded by my fourteen men.”

There is something profound beneath his sharp sentiments. Unwittingly, Salameh too was taken in by the Mossad myth. That legend told of an Israeli organization so cunning and capable it could strike down any Palestinian in the world in his bedroom. Internalizing the myth, Salameh believed that the Mossad knew precisely where his apartment was in Beirut—fifty meters from Abu-Yussef’s place—but was deterred by his fourteen armed guards, which they supposedly knew about. He never considered that the Israeli intelligence agency simply did not know where he lived, which explains why they never came to kill him that night.

Salameh tried to remain unpredictable in his habits. He kept loaded AK
-47
s in every room in his apartment. His boss, Yasser Arafat, was even more obsessive about safety, always maintaining an erratic schedule. He hardly ever spent two nights in the same bed. In an attempt to baffle potential assassins—both Israeli and other—he always left sleeping arrangements for the last minute. Although he was mentioned many times as a possible heir to Arafat, Ali Hassan Salameh was too lazy and far too devoted to luxury and pizzazz to abide by the gray edicts of purposefully erratic behavior.

His second marriage, this time in a white suit, only made him less cautious. In Beirut, on June
8, 1977,
he married Georgina Rizak, a Christian Lebanese woman who had been crowned Miss Universe 1970. For Salameh, it was love at first sight, which hardly explains why he married the beautiful Rizak without divorcing his first wife, the mother of his two sons, Hassan and Osama. As a Muslim he was allowed more than one wife, he maintained. At any rate, Rizak kept him at home, night after night, in the Snobar section of west Beirut.

Salameh, thought to have been behind the Munich attack, was kept alive for years by virtue of his connection to the CIA. He was Arafat’s liaison with the spy agency, a secret channel enabling communications between the Palestinian leader and the American administration, which refused to publicly acknowledge the PLO. More than once, CIA operatives even offered to put Salameh on their payroll.

Up until the early 1970s the CIA was largely uninterested in the Palestinian side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That changed after the brutal attack in Munich and, especially, after the execution of the two American diplomats in Khartoum at the hands of Fatah’s Black September. The CIA sought ways to infiltrate Fatah—the largest of the Palestinian groups. The agency wanted someone who could both warn them of imminent attacks against Americans in Europe, the Middle East, and the increasingly perilous city of Beirut, and dissuade Fatah from pursuing such targets. Ali Hassan Salameh was the man for the job. The CIA first made contact with him in 1969, in Beirut. A friend of Salameh’s introduced him to Robert C. Ames, a case officer working out of the American embassy in Lebanon. On at least two occasions CIA operatives offered Salameh a six-figure monthly salary to work as an agent. He refused. The American system—buying with vast sums of money—backfired with Salameh, wounding his pride. Salameh had no desire to be on the payroll; he wanted to change the thinking of the superpower that refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause.

From 1975 to 1976, during the early years of the civil war in Lebanon, the man affectionately know as “the Persuader,” for his capacity to solve problems and assuage enemy minds, provided protection for the American embassy and its staff in Beirut. It was he who, on June
20, 1976,
safeguarded the long convoy of embassy staff as they fled to Syria when fighting broke out on the streets of Beirut.

Salameh’s connection with the Americans was on and off for ten years. He probably visited the United States twice: once as a member of Arafat’s entourage, when the
ra’is
delivered his famous speech from the U.N.’s podium, and again in 1976, when he went undercover to meet high-ranking administration officials in Washington, and from there, with Rizak, at the time his girlfriend, to New Orleans and Hawaii. The trip, apparently on the CIA’s generous tab, was part of their failed recruitment effort.

As far as Salameh was concerned, his connection with the Americans was his ace in the hole, his life insurance policy. The Americans would keep the Israelis at bay. But it was not that simple. The Israelis played with a different hand; his ace in the hole was useless. In May 1977 Prime Minister Menachem Begin came to power and reissued the authorization given by his predecessors to assassinate Ali Hassan Salameh.

In mid
-1978
Mossad officials held a standard meeting with their American counterparts at CIA. “Did it ever work with Salameh?” a senior American official was asked, referring to the attempts at recruiting him.