The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (22 page)

Ames was trying ardently, perhaps desperately, to use all his powers of empathy to get Zein to persuade Salameh to reestablish contact with the Agency. Bob must have assumed that Mustafa would show this letter to Ali Hassan. The letter contained blatant flattery—but also candid threats. He was also disarming. He was ingratiating himself with the intelligence chief of Force 17, an entity that Washington’s ally in Tel Aviv labeled a terrorist organization. Bob was putting in writing things that if leaked could have created a media firestorm. But he trusted Mustafa and he trusted MJTRUST/2.

Flattery: “Our friend should know that he still has friends in high places, and so does his cause.”

A threat: “His activities in Europe, which are fully documented,
and his plans in our territory, which we know of completely and will hit hard and expose to his organization’s embarrassment, are the only points on which we disagree.”

A plea: “If he works for his own immediate goals there will be no problems and no conflict. I sincerely wish we could talk things over. A great deal has happened in the past year and a good long talk would settle many issues.”

Logistics: “I know our friend cannot travel much, particularly to Europe. I also know why. I know that he can travel safely to Lisbon and I could arrange safe travel to any other European point, if he so desires. It would be useless for me to travel to Beirut as there are people who might link us together and damage both our positions at this point.”

And finally, a personal warning: “Give my best to our friend and tell him I said that he should move his family from Beirut, if he has not already done so.”

Ames obviously knew that the Mossad was targeting Salameh. Mustafa immediately understood that Bob was warning their “friend” to move out of his apartment on Verdun Street. That spring Mustafa showed Bob’s March 26, 1972, letter to Ali Hassan. But he also showed it to Arafat. The PLO chairman scoffed at the veiled warning and suggested that the CIA officer was passing on disinformation just to rattle the Palestinians. “Bob never lies to me,” Mustafa told Arafat. But Salameh ignored the warning and stayed put in his Verdun Street apartment.

Mustafa thereafter decided to take his own precautions on behalf of Ali Hassan. One evening, he dropped by the bar at the Commodore Hotel, where many of Beirut’s foreign correspondents traded stories. (A Palestinian family, a financial supporter of Fatah, owned the Commodore.) Mustafa knew the barman, George, a Christian Palestinian who was in fact a member of Salameh’s Force 17. That evening Mustafa spotted sitting at the bar a reporter from the London
Daily Mail
, a man who he knew was one of Mossad’s reliable sources in Beirut. Mustafa was not a drinker, but that night he told George, “Forget the Heineken, bring me a whiskey.” George poured Mustafa what looked
to be whiskey but was actually black tea—and Mustafa pretended to get tipsy. Slurring his words and speaking loudly, he turned to
Time
magazine’s Abu Rish and said, “I will tell you a secret. We have information that the Israelis are going to hit Ali Hassan’s apartment on Verdun Street. But the Israelis don’t know that Ali has a double layer of security outside the building; he’s got a second unit of men hidden in the lobby. Mossad will be in for a big surprise.”

Less than a year later, on the evening of April 9, 1973, sixteen Israeli commandos slipped into black Mark 7 rubber rafts from the deck of an Israeli missile ship. They were two miles off the coast of Beirut. Led by a future Israeli prime minister, Lt. Col. Ehud Barak, their mission—code-named Operation Spring of Youth—was to land at a private hotel beach, drive five miles into the heart of Beirut, and kill three prominent PLO leaders in their Verdun Street apartments. Muhammed Youssef al-Najar (Abu Youssef) was a lawyer who in 1973 was regarded as Fatah’s number-two commander. Kamal Adwan was a petroleum engineer and a member of Fatah’s central committee. Kamal Nasser, the PLO’s chief spokesman, was a charismatic poet. Adwan and Nasser lived in the same high-rise apartment building on Verdun, not far from the American embassy. Abu Youssef happened to live in an adjoining apartment building. All three men died that night in a hail of bullets. So too did a seventy-year-old Italian woman who opened her apartment door at the wrong moment. Numerous Lebanese policemen also died in a short gun battle as the Israelis departed.

The Palestinian leadership was shocked. Arafat himself had spent the night in a nearby apartment. Arafat survived only because one of his bodyguards heard men talking softly in Hebrew in the street below. The bodyguard, knowing what this meant, quickly hustled Arafat down the back stairwell and pushed him into a waiting car.
It was a very narrow escape. Abu Iyad, the Black September chief, had recently spent the night in one of those apartments.
Half a million mourners attended the funerals of the three Palestinian leaders.

Ali Hassan Salameh was as stunned as anyone by the brazenness of the Israeli assassination team. He told a Lebanese reporter for
Monday
Morning
that the assassinations were “
the result of complete carelessness, which is typical of the Oriental mentality, the fatalistic mentality. My home was about 50 meters from the late Abu Youssef’s home. The Israeli assassins didn’t come to my home for a very simple reason: it was guarded by 14 men.” He knew the Israelis were looking for him. “In the ‘spook battle’ between us and the Israelis,” Salameh insisted, “we have been able to score several victories.” But the reality was that the PLO was always outgunned and always on the defensive.

Mustafa had no idea that three other high-ranking PLO officials lived on the same street as Salameh. After the assassinations, the Mossad escape cars sped right by Ali Hassan’s apartment, traveling at ninety miles per hour. Mustafa later reminded Arafat of Ames’s warning to Salameh to move his family—and he told Arafat to check with George, the barman at the Commodore Hotel, about the story he had passed on to the London
Daily Mail
reporter. Mustafa was sure he had saved Ali Hassan’s life. Arafat grudgingly told him, “
Okay, whatever Bob says from now on, it is like it is written in the Koran.”

Black September’s Munich Olympics operation changed everything. In early July 1972, Abu Iyad was sitting in a Rome café with several colleagues when he learned from reading a newspaper that the International Olympic Committee had disqualified any Palestinians from competing at the Summer Olympics, scheduled to commence in late August. Israelis would be allowed to compete, but no Palestinians because, obviously, they didn’t have a country. Abu Iyad was incensed. And then it occurred to him that a billion people around the globe would be watching the Olympics. It would be the first Olympics televised live. Black September, he decided, should force itself onto this world stage. As he later explained to Éric Rouleau, the French journalist who coauthored his 1981 memoir,
an attack on the Olympics would serve three purposes: “(1) to present the existence of the Palestinian People to the whole world, whether they like it or not; (2) to secure the release of 200 Palestinian fighters locked in Israeli jails; and (3) to use
the unprecedented number of media outlets in one city to display the Palestinian struggle—for better or worse!”

It was Abu Iyad’s idea to attack the Olympics, but he turned the details over to other men. Mohammed Oudeh—otherwise known as Abu Daoud—was the chief architect of the operation. He organized the smuggling of weapons into Munich. He traveled to Munich himself and gave the eight chosen Black September commandos their final instructions. But many others were involved, including Fahkri al-Omri, who served as Abu Iyad’s deputy in Fatah. According to Aaron J. Klein, a Jerusalem correspondent for
Time
—and a former intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Force—Al-Omri “
picked up the keys and collected the weapons from the lockers in Munich.” Klein’s book,
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response
, is perhaps the most authoritative account of the Munich operation and its aftermath. Klein estimates that some one hundred accomplices—many of them Palestinian students or exiles living in Europe—assisted Black September that summer.

Before sunrise on September 5, 1972, eight Black September commandos stormed the dormitory rooms housing the Israeli Olympics team. Two Israelis were shot dead in the initial invasion. Nine were seized as hostages. Initially, the commandos told German authorities that they would release the hostages in exchange for the release of 234 Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails. Later, the commandos demanded an airplane to fly the Israeli hostages and themselves to Cairo. The Germans agreed—and then carried out a woefully ill-planned ambush. As German soldiers advanced on the Black Septemberists, the commandos turned on the nine Israeli athletes and killed them with grenades and machine-gun fire. Five of the Palestinians were killed, and after an hourlong hunt, the three surviving Palestinian commandos were arrested.

Munich was a bloody tragedy, but it was also a perfect example of unintended consequences. Abu Iyad later called it
“a tragedy for the
Israelis and us.” He had planned a public relations extravaganza on the world stage. He had not planned a suicide mission, and neither had he expected the Israeli athletes to be killed. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud had hoped the Black September cadres would fly out with their hostages and later orchestrate a prisoner exchange. Instead, the operation had become a stain on the honor of the entire Palestinian people. In the eyes of the world, the Palestinians were now all bloody terrorists waging war on innocents.

Brian Jenkins, an American expert on terrorism, once famously quipped, “
Terrorism is theater.” What he meant was that usually terrorists “want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead.” In this sense, Munich was bad theater. It got the Palestinians the wrong kind of publicity. And it killed innocents.

Munich prompted the Israelis to retaliate. Three days after the tragedy, Israeli air strikes on Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon killed and wounded as many as two hundred Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians. That was only the beginning. Another forty-five Palestinians were killed by Israeli ground forces in southern Lebanon. On September 15, 1972, Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized an assassination program called Operation Wrath of God; Palestinians even remotely associated with Black September and Munich would be targeted for killing. Israel had used assassinations as a counterterrorism policy in the past, but over the next year ten Arabs ostensibly responsible for the Munich killings were systematically killed in Paris, Nicosia, Beirut, Athens, and Norway. Black September had initiated a very personal war.

By many accounts, Mossad placed Ali Hassan Salameh at the top of its list of people who deserved to die because of their responsibility for the Munich murders. Writes Klein in
Striking Back
, “
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.” But Klein also writes that both Abu Daoud and Tawfiq Tirawi, once a senior aide to Abu Iyad, dispute this. They agree that Salameh was involved in five
major attacks in Europe and elsewhere, but they deny that he played any role in Munich.

Other accounts differ. Simon Reeve, the British author of
One Day in September
, places Salameh at a Munich railway-station restaurant on the evening of September 4, together with Abu Daoud, giving the eight commandos their final instructions. Afterwards, Reeve reports, Salameh left Munich and traveled to East Berlin, where he set up “
a forward command post in a flat … with the connivance of the East German government.” Reeve’s source for this story is his interview with one anonymous Israeli intelligence source—and Michael Bar-Zohar and Eitan Haber’s 1983 book,
The Quest for the Red Prince
. Bar-Zohar and Haber’s book contains no citations, but they obviously had the cooperation of many unnamed Israeli intelligence sources. Written in 1982, their account was the first to establish Salameh’s legend as “the Red Prince.” They portray him as the real operational commander of the Munich attack, reporting that
he “was wide awake at his hideout in East Berlin when the operation launched.” And they have Yasir Arafat warmly embracing him upon his return to Beirut: “You are my son, I love you as a son!” Bar-Zohar and Haber may have embellished this part of their story—but it was certainly an accurate reflection of what Mossad wanted to believe about Ali Hassan Salameh.
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