A Shin Bet agent who was close to Amir when he fired at Rabin testified : “I heard a policeman shout to people to calm down. The shot is a blank.” His evidence was given in closed court.
Leah Rabin stated at the same hearing that her husband did not stagger and fall after apparently being shot at close range. “He was standing and looking very well.” She also insisted she was kept from seeing her husband for a full hour after she had arrived at the hospital and, according to Chamish, was told by a high-ranking intelligence officer that she should “not worry as the whole thing had been staged.”
The prime minister’s widow has steadfastly refused to make any public comment on this or any aspect of her husband’s murder.
Chamish believes she had been scared into silence like seventeen nurses at the hospital where Rabin was admitted on that day. “The plan was evil and brilliant. They persuaded Rabin to let someone take a pot shot at him to help him regain his popularity. That was why he did not wear a bulletproof vest. Amir was carefully selected for his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. He was a dupe in the hands of his controller or controllers. What he couldn’t possibly know was how they would use his blank shot to murder Rabin in his car on the way to hospital.”
Barry Chamish does not fit the image of a “conspiracy nut.” He is careful in what he writes and overwhelms every piece of evidence with corroborative testimony. He has been slow to rush to judgment and gives the impression there is a great deal more he can say but won’t—yet. More certain, Chamish is a man who walks his own path, is beholden to no one and, most important of all, is trusted.
He has posted all the evidence he has so far obtained on the Internet, doing so partly as insurance and partly because he wants to get the truth out. He is also realistic enough to accept it may never surface in a form suitable for a court of law.
CHAPTER 7
THE GENTLEMAN SPY
On a damp spring morning in 1997, David Kimche instructed Arab landscapers how he wanted his garden rearranged in a Tel Aviv suburb. His manner was diffident, the mellifluous voice more suited to a college campus than dealing with manual workers, suggesting Kimche was descended from generations of administrators who had once raised Britain’s Union Jack over far-flung lands. The English-born son of middle-class Jews, Kimche’s impeccable manners deepened the image of the quintessential Englishman. Expensively tailored clothes emphasized a figure kept trim with regular workouts and a strict diet.
Kimche looked twenty years younger than his close to sixty years and there was a boyish quality about him. His every gesture while briefing the gardeners—the flicking away of hair from his forehead, the lengthy pauses, the thoughtful stare—suggested a lifetime spent cloistered on a college campus.
In reality, David Kimche had been what Meir Amit called “one of the intellectual powerhouses” behind many Mossad operations. His reasoning skills had been accompanied by breathtaking nerve, catching even the wariest with some totally unexpected move that had quickly earned the respect of even cynical colleagues. But his very intellectualism had often made them keep their distance; he was too remote and abstract for their earthy ways. Several felt like Rafi Eitan, “that if you said ‘good morning’ to David, his mind would already be deciding how ‘good’ it was and how much of the morning was left.”
Within Mossad, Kimche was widely regarded as the epitome of the gentleman spy with the cunning of an alley cat. His journey into the Mossad fold began after he left Oxford University with a First in Social Science in 1968. A few months later he was recruited by Mossad, then newly under the command of Meir Amit, who was seeking to introduce into its ranks a sprinkling of university graduates to complement the ruthlessness of men like Rafi Eitan who had learned their skills in the field.
How, where, and by whom Kimche was recruited was something he would forever keep under lock and key. The rumor mills of the Israeli intelligence community offered several scenarios: that he had signed on over a good dinner with a London publisher, a Jew who had long been a sayan; that the proposition came in a rabbi’s office in a Golders Green synagogue; that a distant relative had made the first move.
The only certainty is that one spring morning in the early Sixties, Kimche walked into Mossad’s headquarters building in Tel Aviv, the newest member of the Planning and Strategy Department. To one side was a branch of the Bank of Israel, several business offices, and a café. Uncertain what to do or where to go, Kimche waited in the cavernous lobby. How different it was from the imposing entrance of the CIA he had read about. At Langley the agency proudly proclaimed its existence in marble on the floor with an inlaid sixteen-pointed star on a shield dominated by the head of a bald eagle in profile, accompanied by the words “Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.” Set in a wall were the words of the apostle John about people being set free by the truth. Beyond the plaque were banks of elevators, guarded by armed guards.
But here, in the somewhat shabby lobby of the building on King Saul Boulevard, were only bank tellers at their stations and people seated on the café’s plastic chairs. Not one of them looked remotely likely to be a Mossad employee. In the far corner of the lobby an unmarked door opened and a familiar figure emerged, a consular officer at the Israeli embassy in London who had supplied Kimche’s travel documents. Leading Kimche back to the door, he explained that his own diplomatic status protected his real work as a Mossad katsa in Britain. At the door he handed Kimche two keys and said that from now on they would be his only means to enter Mossad headquarters. One key opened the door, the second the elevators that rose through Mossad’s eight floors. The headquarters was “a building within a building” with its own utilities—power, water, sanitation—separate from the rest of the tower block.
It had become Mossad’s headquarters shortly after the end of the Suez War in 1956.
That year, in October, British, French, and Israeli forces had launched a joint invasion of Egypt to recapture the Suez Canal, which Egyptian president Gamal Nasser had nationalized. The invasion had the hallmark of the “gunboat diplomacy” that for so long had dominated the region. The United States had almost no prior warning of an invasion that had turned out to be the last gasp of both British and French domination of the Middle East. Washington had exerted massive diplomatic pressure to stop the fighting, fearing that it would draw the Soviet Union into the conflict on the side of Egypt, creating a superpower confrontation. When the fighting ended on the banks of the Suez Canal, Britain and France found they had been replaced by the United States as the dominating foreign power in the Middle East. But Israel insisted on retaining the land it had captured in the Sinai Desert. Richard Helms, a future director of the CIA, flew to Tel Aviv and was received by senior staff in Mossad’s headquarters. They struck Helms “like a bunch of Realtors, proudly pointing out the amenities.”
Riding up in the elevator, Kimche’s guide explained that the lower floor housed the listening and communications center; on the next floor came the offices of junior staff. Upper floors were given over to analysts, planners, and operations personnel. Research and Development had a floor to itself. On the top floor were the offices of the director general and his senior aides.
Kimche was given space among the planners and strategists. His office was equipped like all the others: a cheap wooden desk, a steel filing cabinet with only one key, a black telephone, and an internal directory stamped “Do Not Remove.” A strip of carpet completed the furnishings. The office was painted olive green and offered a fine panoramic view over the city. Thirteen years on, the headquarters showed signs of wear and tear; paint had cracked on some walls and carpeting needed replacing.
But, despite these failings, David Kimche sensed he had arrived at an eventful time. Meir Amit was about to leave, shortly to be followed by Rafi Eitan and other senior Mossad officers.
Kimche soon came to recognize the quirks of colleagues: the analyst who invariably prefaced a judgment with the words “this is a European maneuver, classic a
s Clausewitz in its way”; the head of department who signaled an action by stuffing black flakes of tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and when the smoke came out white, he had made a decision; the strategist who always ended a briefing by saying espionage was a continuous education in human frailty. These were all men who had earned their dues and they welcomed Kimche’s enthusiasm and his ability to turn a problem on its head. They also sensed he fully understood that solving an enemy’s deceptions was as important as perpetuating Mossad’s own.
Part of his work included monitoring events in Morocco; there were still a substantial number of Jews living there under the repressive regime of King Hassan. In an attempt to make their lives easier, Meir Amit had established a “working relationship” with the monarch’s feared security service, finding common cause in trying to remove Egypt’s President Nasser, whose own hatred of Israel was only equaled by what he felt for the king. Nasser saw the monarch as a stumbling block to his dream of establishing a powerful Arab coalition stretching from the Suez Canal to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The potential threat to Israel of such a coalition had persuaded Meir Amit to train the king’s men in counterintelligence and interrogation techniques that stopped little short of sophisticated torture.
Within Morocco, a small but equally ruthless opposition survived, led by Mehdi Ben-Barka. Kimche had charted Ben-Barka’s career: the king’s loyal tutor; onetime president of Morocco’s national consultative assembly, a virtually toothless parliament that merely rubber-stamped Hassan’s increasingly oppressive decrees against his people. Finally Ben-Barka had become the one authentic voice of opposition to Hassan. Time and again Ben-Barka had barely escaped being captured by the king’s men. But knowing it was only a matter of time before he was arrested, the charismatic former schoolteacher had fled to Europe. From there he continued to plot the downfall of Hassan.
Twice Ben-Barka’s small but efficient resistance movement in Morocco had come close to launching successful bomb plots against the monarch. The enraged Hassan ordered Ben-Barka tried in absentia and sentenced to death, and Ben-Barka responded by ordering fresh attacks against the king.
In May 1965, Hassan asked Mossad to help deal with Ben-Barka. The task of evaluating the request was given to David Kimche. Later that month he traveled on his British passport to London. Ostensibly he was on vacation. In reality he was finalizing his plans. Equipped with a perfectly doctored second British passport provided by a sayan, and with a Moroccan visa, Kimche flew to Rome; he spent a day there sightseeing—a move to make sure he was not being followed—and then traveled on to Morocco.
He was met at Rabat Airport by Muhammed Oufkir, the country’s fearsome minister of the interior. That night, over a dinner enlivened by the presence of some of the country’s best belly dancers, Oufkir spelled out what the king wanted: Ben-Barka’s head. Displaying both a crude sense of humor and an appreciation of Jewish history, Oufkir had added: “After all, your Jewish Salome asked your King Herod for the head of a troublemaker.”
Kimche said that while that was indeed correct, it really was not a matter for him. Oufkir would have to come back with him to Israel.
Next day the two men flew to Rome and caught a flight to Tel Aviv. Meir Amit met them in a safe house. He was polite but cautious. He told Kimche he was “not very excited” at the prospect of doing Oufkir’s dirty work and insisted our “involvement would be confined to preparatory work.”
Unknown to Meir Amit, Oufkir had already made an arrangement with a faction within France’s intelligence service, SDECE, to murder Ben-Barka if he could be lured out of his fortresslike home in Geneva and across the Swiss border into France. Still reluctant, Meir Amit had insisted that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol must personally sanction Mossad’s involvement. The prime minister gave it.
Mossad set to work. A Moroccan-born katsa traveled to Geneva and infiltrated Ben-Barka’s circle. Over several months, the agent carefully planted the idea that he had access to a sympathetic French millionaire who would like to see King Hassan topped and genuine democracy come to Morocco. Kimche had created this fiction. On October 26, 1965, he learned that Ben-Barka, “like the Scarlet Pimpernel of old,” was about to travel to Paris.
Mossad’s communications center sent a coded message to Oufkir in Morocco. The following day the minister and a small team of Moroccan security men flew to Paris. That night the minister was briefed by the SDECE faction. Concerned he had been excluded from the meeting, the Mossad agent who had accompanied Ben-Barka to the French capital called Kimche on a secure line for instructions. Kimche consulted Meir Amit. Both agreed, in Amit’s later words, “that something nasty was cooking and we should stay well clear.”
Next evening an SDECE surveillance van was positioned outside when Ben-Barka arrived for dinner at a restaurant in the St. Germaine district. He believed he had come to meet the millionaire. After he waited an hour and still no one had showed, Ben-Barka left the restaurant. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, he was grabbed by two SDECE agents and bundled into the van. It was driven to a villa in the Fontenay-le-Vicomte district that the SDECE used from time to time to interrogate its own suspects. Throughout the night, Oufkir supervised Ben-Barka’s questioning and torture until, at dawn, the broken man was executed. Oufkir photographed the body before it was buried in the villa’s garden. The minister flew home with the film to show the king.
When the corpse was discovered, the outcry in France reached all the way to the president’s palace. Charles de Gaulle ordered an unprecedented investigation that led to a massive purging of the SDECE. Its director, anxious to maintain interservice collegiality, struggled to keep Mossad’s name out of the affair. But de Gaulle, no friend of Israel, was convinced that Mossad was involved. He told aides that the operation bore the “hallmark of Tel Aviv.” Only the Israelis, he had fumed, would show such total disregard for international law. A once-close relationship between Israel and France, established in the 1956 Suez War, was over. De Gaulle promptly ordered that arms supplies to Israel should stop, along with all intelligence cooperation. Meir Amit would “remember the body blows from Paris raining down.”
For Kimche, “It was heroic to see the way Meir Amit handled the situation. He could have tried to blame me or the others involved in the operation. Instead he insisted on taking full responsibility. He was a true leader.”
Prime Minister Eshkol’s government, battered by the reaction from Paris, distanced itself from Mossad’s chief. More criticism came from an unexpected source. The more Meir Amit protested that Mossad’s role had been “marginal,” no more than “supplying a few passports and hiring some cars,” the more his predecessor, Isser Harel, insisted the Ben-Barka affair would never have happened in his day. Meir Amit warned the prime minister they would both sink under such sniping. Eshkol responded by setting up a committee of inquiry, headed by the then foreign minister, Golda Meir. The committee concluded Meir Amit should resign, but he refused until Eshkol did the same. Stalemate followed. It was not until a year later that Meir Amit accepted that the death of Ben-Barka was no longer going to trouble him. But it had been a close-run call.
By then Kimche had other matters to concern him. The Palestinians had secretly trained a commando unit to exploit a security weakness not even Mossad had anticipated: midair aircraft hijacking. Once a plane was seized between destinations, it would be flown to a friendly Arab country. There the passengers would be held for ransom—either for substantial sums of money to buy their freedom, or to be exchanged for Arab prisoners held by Israel. An additional bonus would be the worldwide publicity for the PLO cause.
In July 1968, an El Al flight from Rome was hijacked to Algeria. Mossad was stunned at the simple audacity of the operation. A team of katsas flew to Algeria while Kimche and other planners worked almost around the clock to devise a strategy to free the terrified passengers. But any attempt to storm the aircraft was hampered by the presence of the world’s media crews covering the story. Kimche recommended playing for time i
n the hope the story would lose its momentum and the katsas could move. But the hijackers had anticipated that and began to issue bloodcurdling threats unless their demands were met: the freeing of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. The Algerian government supported the hijackers. Kimche realized: “We were between the proverbial rock and a hard place.” He was one of those who reluctantly recommended the prisoners should be exchanged for passengers, knowing “full well the consequences of such action. It would pave the way for further hijackings. It would ensure the PLO cause would receive from now on maximum coverage. Israel had been put on the defensive. So had Western governments who also had no answer to hijackings. Yet what could we do except to wait grimly for the next hijacking?”
And come they did, each one better prepared than the last. In a short time half a dozen more passenger aircraft were overpowered by hijackers who were not only expert in concealing weapons and placing explosives on board, but had been trained to fly the actual aircraft or know the actual workings of a flight deck crew. In the Libyan Desert, they practiced exchanging fire in the confined area of an airplane cabin, knowing that El Al had now introduced armed guards on its flights—one of the first moves Kimche had recommended. He had also correctly predicted that the hijackers would know the laws of the various countries they would be flying in and out of so that if they were captured, their colleagues could use those laws to obtain their freedom by bargaining or threatening.
Kimche knew that Mossad urgently needed an incident that would enable the service to overcome the hijackers through the two skills for which it was justifiably renowned: cunning and ruthlessness. And, just as the hijackers effectively used publicity, Kimche wanted an operation whose outcome would match the universal praise for Israel that had followed the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann. The incident Kimche needed must have high drama, considerable risk, and an against-all-the-odds outcome. Those elements would combine to show Mossad leading the fight back.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 17
