Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (22 page)

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Everything failed . . .”

The Mossad interpreted this as a green light for assassination. Once the Americans had given up their efforts, they figured, he was fair game. The different branches of the American and Israeli intelligence agencies were already then in close contact. SIGINT, signal intelligence of telecommunications, was shared and efforts were made to ensure that HUMINT sources were not approached by both sides. Several times a year Mossad and CIA representatives convened for sessions on terrorism that went far beyond the everyday cooperation and exchange of information. The Americans would understand Israel’s need to eliminate the terrorist.

From an Israeli perspective, Ali Hassan Salameh was one of the planners of Munich, period. Dozens of senior ex-Mossad and ex–Military Intelligence officers emphasized, over the course of our conversations, that the intelligence pointing to his involvement was both very strong and diverse. One senior officer told me that Salameh continued to plan terror attacks in Israel well after Munich and after the European theater quieted. Salameh, he said, was the man in Arafat’s office who would translate the ideology into action, making the calls from headquarters to operatives in the field.

The Palestinians tell a different story. Both Abu-Daoud and Tawfiq Tirawi, a senior deputy of Abu-Iyad’s and current head of the General Intelligence Apparatus in the West Bank, acknowledge a long litany of attacks orchestrated by Salameh in Europe, but categorically deny his involvement in the Munich attack. When speaking with Tirawi in his Ramallah office, he made clear to me that his intention is not to belittle Salameh’s lifework, but to set the record straight. Salameh, though, was a braggart, unafraid of embellishing the truth. His bravado reached the Tzomet division and they duly reported that his hands were red with the blood of the murdered at Munich. The Israeli media crowned him “The Red Prince.”

Salameh was responsible for four major terror attacks in Europe and one in Asia, according to Palestinian sources. The first, with the aid of Muhammad Boudia, on March
15, 1971,
entailed the explosion of a
16,000-
ton oil tank in Rotterdam. The second came on December
15, 1971,
and involved a lone terrorist who waited in ambush for Ziad Al-Rifa’i, the Jordanian ambassador in London. Rifa’i was lightly wounded in his hand. The third attack was perpetrated in Cologne, Germany. On February
6, 1972,
five young Palestinians with Jordanian passports—supposedly Mossad agents—were shot and killed. Half a year later, on August
4, 1972,
he planned an attack along with Boudia that resulted in the blowing up of the oil storage tanks in Trieste, burning
200,000
gallons of oil used primarily by Germany. Then too Black September took responsibility for the attack. The fifth attack planned by Salameh was the unsuccessful takeover of the Israeli embassy in Bangkok in late December 1972. There, the terrorists agreed to be flown to Egypt empty-handed. Salameh was furious with the outcome, taking the lack of determination on the terrorists’ part as a personal insult. There were some in Arafat’s inner circle who took care to remind him of the failure in Bangkok now and again.

In conversations I had with senior ex-Caesarea officers they looked at their desire to kill Salameh in terms of closure—we want to “close the circle,” they said. To set the record straight after the disaster in Lillehammer. The passing of time did not cool that desire: it intensified it. From 1972 onward many terrible attacks were carried out by Palestinian terrorists, claiming dozens of innocent lives, and yet no one hurried to draw Xs on the faces of those responsible. Few were added to the Mossad hit list. Salameh, despite a period of silence, never stopped being a top priority. “At that time, were there senior Palestinian activists more deserving of the opportunity to meet their creator than Ali Hassan Salameh?” I asked a senior Mossad officer. The reply: “Undoubtedly, yes.” Despite the steep price invested, in terms of money, technological resources, and manpower, Caesarea’s combatants remained devoted—the chase bordered on obsession.

In the second half of 1978 the noose began to tighten. A careful analysis of the abundant intelligence pouring in isolated a few weak points that could, with proper planning, be made into a Capture Point. Salameh was good about going to visit his mother and sisters. The Mossad recognized that in order to reach the building they shared he had to pass along the north–south route of Verdun Street. That was the Capture Point. In 1978, the Mossad decided to send an undercover Caesarea combatant to Beirut. She, like Sylvia Raphael, worked for the Mossad part-time, only when asked.

Tel Aviv decided that the combatant, who had been trained well for her position in Caesarea, would take up residence in a flat in Beirut that overlooked Verdun Street and collect information about Ali Hassan Salameh. The combatant, exposed many years ago as Erika Chambers, came to Beirut in November 1978, carrying a British passport issued on May
30, 1975,
number 25948. She made sure that her neighbors took note of her harmless eccentricities, painting wildly and feeding the neighborhood cats. Her cover: she was a worker at a Palestinian children’s aid organization.

Chambers rented an apartment on the eighth floor of a luxury building on January
10, 1979.
From her apartment in the Anis Assaf building she could see narrow Beka Street, into which Salameh turned on his afternoon journeys from his wife’s flat. Chambers rented the place for three months, paying
3,500
Lebanese pounds up front. The Lebanese investigative report states that two foreign men, one Canadian and one British, entered the country with fake papers and passports. They were Caesarea combatants.

At 1525 hours
,
on January
22, 1979,
Ali Hassan Salameh left his pregnant wife and got into the tan Chevrolet that waited for him with its motor running. Two bodyguards rode with him in the Chevy and two more climbed into the Land Rover following them. Salameh was on the way to his mother’s house for the birthday party of his niece, Nidal’s daughter, who turned three that day. A video camera had been purchased for the occasion.

The convoy slowly turned right onto the narrow Beka Street, where a rented Volkswagen waited on the left-hand side of the road, packed with eleven pounds of hexagene, a plastic explosive equal to seventy pounds of dynamite. One of the combatants stood a hundred yards away and watched the convoy approach. He flipped the switch on the detonator as the Chevrolet rolled past. The explosion rocked the whole block. An eyewitness described seeing a ball of fire and then hearing a deafening explosion. Cars lit up in flames and several bodies were strewn on the street, burned by the flames. One man stumbled out of the car and fell to the ground. People recognized him even in his current state—Abu-Hassan, Ali Hassan Salameh, they said. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Salameh’s funeral was well attended. One memorable scene from that day: Hassan, the thirteen-year-old son of the
shahid,
sitting in Arafat’s lap, an AK
-47
in hand, a kaffiyeh similar to the one Arafat wore across his shoulders, and a military beret on his head. It seemed clear that he represented the third generation of armed struggle.

At twenty-nine, sixteen years after the funeral, Hassan returned to Palestine as a businessman and took up residence in Ramallah. Hassan Ali Salameh, educated in some of the best private schools in England, had a different take on life than that of his father and grandfather. “My father wanted me to be brought up away from his kind of life. I have a genuine desire for peace and I have a different mentality from the fighters of the past,” he said.

33
                  
“KEEP ME POSTED”

TEL AVIV, MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS
OCTOBER 1986

In autumn 1986 the members of the Target-Tracking Committee were called to the “Seminary,” the Mossad’s instructional facility. Located on a slight hill overlooking the sea, it was a place to which the military men, in flannel shirts and jeans, were always happy to come. Aside from the benefit of shedding their uniforms, they knew lunch would be world-class. The Mossad was famous for it. Many heads of state were received in the Seminary. Golda went there to relax after cancer treatments.

Each member of the five-person forum understood that a vital piece of raw intelligence regarding a major terrorist had come through the pipes. In an upstairs room, with the sea twinkling outside the window, they would be asked to analyze the intelligence and determine whether it was significant enough to put a person on, or off, the target list. Today’s news was different. The Mossad Facha division head waited for everyone to take their place around the hardwood conference table before he let the news spill out. “They’re all dead,” he said of the terrorists responsible for the Munich Massacre. “None of them are breathing anymore.”

Everyone wanted details, but the Facha chief wouldn’t say another word. The committee members knew his announcement related to two of the three terrorists that had left the scene of the massacre alive. The Mossad had reported that the third man, Adnan Al-Jishey, had died of heart failure sometime in
1978–1979
in the Persian Gulf state of Dubai. His natural death, they were told, was caused by a genetic heart mutation. Now they learned that the circle had been closed—Jamal Al-Jishey and Mohammed Safady had also expired. All of the perpetrators of the murder had paid the price. The news was sent up the chain of command to Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Nothing was leaked to the press.

Khaled Abu-Toameh, an Israeli Arab journalist, had certainly not heard about the meeting. On July
31, 1992,
he published an interview with Jamal Al-Jishey. The glaring headline over the front-page article in the weekly
Jerusalem
was: “Mossad Still Trying to Kill Me.” Al-Jishey, forty, lived in Tunis and continued to abide by strict security precautions. “I’m sure the Mossad is still looking for me,” he said. “As far as the Israelis are concerned, the case is not yet closed. The Mossad will try to kill me until the day I die.”

An additional testament to Al-Jishey’s sound health came in 2000, with the release of the Academy Award–winning documentary
One Day in September.
In Arthur Cohen’s movie, Al-Jishey sits for long interviews, his face blackened and his form distorted by a hat.

The fate of Mohammed Safady, the third terrorist to leave Munich alive, remains ambiguous, although most analysts tended to believe he had been killed. Some members of the intelligence community intimated that his death had come at the hands of the Lebanese Christian Phalangists—Israel’s allies—as a gesture of sorts to the Israeli Mossad. The
Jerusalem
article supported that notion, noting that Jamal Al-Jishey was the last man standing from the massacre. Tawfiq Tirawi disagrees. In a conversation we held in his Ramallah office in July 2005, Tirawi confirmed that he and Safady were close friends and that Safady was alive and well. “As alive as you are,” Tirawi said, smiling playfully, refusing to add details. “The Israelis could still harm him,” he explained.

Thought to be dead, Jamal Al-Jishey and Mohammed Safady were officially removed from the Israeli hit list in 1986, at the close of the meeting held in the Seminary. The permanent members of the committee were the head of Target Branch of Military Intelligence, a lieutenant colonel; the head of the Terror Division in Military Intelligence, a colonel; the head of the Intelligence Gathering Division in Military Intelligence, a colonel; the head of a branch of Unit 8200, Israel’s high-quality NSA equivalent, a lieutenant colonel; and the host of the meeting, the head of the Facha division at the Mossad, the equivalent of a major general. “The Mossad member was always someone serious, a former combatant, very mission-oriented,” one of the regular members told me. “The list itself had a maximum of fifteen slots. Over the years, two or three names were taken off the list and replaced by others after it became clear that the person was not involved in Munich. Others were added when information implicated them in the attack. Some kept their borderline status the whole time.”

The meetings went straight to the point. “We addressed only new intelligence. Usually one of the agencies had new information about a wanted man, something like upcoming travel plans. Once we all agreed that the information was credible, we shifted gears, becoming more focused, active, and secretive. The Mossad would then bring in Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer. He and his staff officers would organize and collect all of the intelligence information, including pictures of the target, and the target buildings, from the ground and from above. As the plans progressed, the attention to detail increased. At this stage we were all in operation mode.”

The head of the Mossad brought the finalized plan to the Heads of Agencies Committee. There, the heads of the Mossad, Shabak, and Military Intelligence, frequently joined by the military aide to the prime minister, could debate the necessity or timing of a mission, arguing for its suspension or delay. Only the prime minister had veto power. The need for these meetings was purely practical. The 1995 assassination of Fatkhi Shkaki illustrates their utility.

As head of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a small, extreme terrorist organization, Fatkhi Shkaki proved himself quite able. He was a strong leader with a firm grip on every aspect of his organization. In January 1995, after a deadly attack at Beit Lid junction east of the Israeli city of Netanya, it was decided to begin planning his assassination. The goal was preventive—it was assumed that eliminating the capable Shkaki would keep Islamic Jihad out of action for a year or two.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin authorized the commencement of operational assassination plans. For roughly two months the Mossad collected intelligence on Shkaki, filling his already fat file with even more information. The intensive intelligence-gathering effort bore fruit. Shkaki could be killed in early summer 1995. They presented their plan and the proof of his guilt to the agency heads.

Uri Saguy, head of Military Intelligence, was dead set against the Mossad plan. After the meeting he spoke with Prime Minister Rabin, explaining that the assassination, which was to be carried out in the heart of Damascus, would damage the already shaky, ongoing Israeli-Syrian peace negotiations. Saguy asked that the operation be moved to a different locale, somewhere neutral, a place that would not impact the chance of peace. Rabin accepted his argument. He instructed the Mossad to change their plans.

Shkaki, a terrorist with the blood of dozens of Israelis on his hands, a man with a bulldozer-like ability to get things done in the world of organized terrorism, lived in Damascus, and rarely left. Shabtai Shavit, the head of the Mossad, and others in the organization were forced to accept Rabin’s decision. Their plan, tailor-made for Damascus and ready to be executed at a moment’s notice, had to be shelved, perhaps indefinitely.

The Mossad continued to collect intelligence on Shkaki, learning his routine and paying special attention to his travel plans. They needed a clean plan, something that would leave no Israeli prints. They learned that when Shkaki did leave Damascus, it was to one of two places—Tehran, on a direct flight, or Libya, which he reached either by ferry, via Malta, or plane, via Tunis. The Mossad chose the island of Malta. Saguy and the prime minister were pleased. All they had to do was wait. Once Caesarea was given the go-ahead, operations were frozen eight different times; once, out of a sudden concern for the assassins’ well-being just thirty seconds before they pulled the trigger. On October
28, 1995,
Shkaki was shot dead outside the Diplomat Hotel in Malta. His killers, two combatants from Kidon, Caesarea’s assassination wing, fled the scene on a motorcycle, and left the country immediately.

Israeli prime ministers had the power to take someone’s life with a nod of their head. The way those decisions were addressed often revealed a great deal about a leader’s character. They were far from the public eye when they met the heads of Mossad and they knew that nothing they said or did would be leaked to the public. The prime minister could, and did, act according to his or her conscience and worldview. Rabin was a ponderer, asking pesky and prying questions. He was pedantic, had a phenomenal memory, and demanded solid answers. He often sent Military Intelligence and Mossad officials packing. “It hasn’t matured,” he’d say in his slow baritone, leaving everyone to wonder if the timing was poor politically, the indictment insufficiently strong, or the man insufficiently guilty.

The routine has been the same since Golda. The prime minister is given a top secret file with a picture of the proposed target, some background data, and a densely worded, multi-paged indictment. Most prime ministers avoided reading the indictment, skipping straight to the recommendation, which, of course, always urged death.

At times intelligence information failed to translate into explicit guilt, but in the case of Munich, each prime minister, from Golda Meir to Yitzhak Rabin, by way of Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Shimon Peres, thought that the vengeful killing of
saya’an
s and terrorists alike was the proper response to that dreadful massacre. Not one of them said “let it go.” Most of them never even asked the basic questions: Does this activist, implicated in the Munich Massacre, still have a role in terror attacks? Is he a threat today? Palatable words and titles like “logistical terror assistant” and “architect” were created, and would be found in the recommendation section of the indictments handed to the prime minister. But “architect” could easily refer to someone who once said something along the lines of “Italy could be a good place for an attack now.” For that, he could pay with his life.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin trusted “our boys.” He did not examine details. Shimon Peres, in contrast, fired off numerous questions. He was not fond of assassination missions. That changed in 1996. At the time he was in an election campaign against right-wing Likud Party candidate Benjamin Netanyahu. During the three months leading up to the election, Islamic Jihad and Hamas carried out numerous deadly bus bombings and other terror attacks, claiming many Israeli lives and taking a toll on the national mood. Peres feared a high-profile attack on the eve of the elections, certain to sink his chances of winning. Peres turned to the Mossad. He asked them to prepare assassination missions that could be ready to go at a moment’s notice, carried out within twenty-four hours. He ruled out Syria (diplomatic negotiations) and Jordan (a close neighbor and friend), leaving only second-tier countries. Caesarea, displeased with the nature of the task, prepared a number of missions, targeting
saya’an
s. In the end, there was no attack and no Israeli response.

Yizhak Shamir was the easiest prime minister to work with. As a former member of the Lechi, the pre-state Jewish underground, and of the Mossad, Shamir reveled in the details, and avoided political excuses. He never said, “I’m going to Paris for a diplomatic visit next week and it would be improper for there to be a mission there concurrently.” He was willing to authorize. One of the few times he refused to do so was in December 1987. Shamir was in the hospital at the time. Caesarea was in a good position to assassinate a senior member of Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Council (PFLP-GC). The man, allegedly responsible for numerous attacks against Israel, was on the hit list and the assassins were in place. Shabtai Shavit went to the hospital, seeking Shamir’s approval. When he returned, he told the expectant Mossad officers that Shamir had not been in the mood to talk about it, granting the PFLP-GC operative his life.

Each prime minister’s military aide could receive all transmissions and codes as they were issued over the course of a mission in a very high-tech twenty-four-hour operations room. Prime ministers responded differently as missions unfolded. Some said, “Keep me posted.” Others, “Let me know when it’s over.”