Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  On June 27, 1976, an Air France plane filled with Jewish passengers, en route to Paris from Tel Aviv, was hijacked after a stopover at Athens Airport, which was notorious for lax security. The hijackers were members of the extreme Wadi Haddad faction and they made two demands : the freeing of forty Palestinians in Israeli jails, together with a further dozen held in European prisons; and the release of two German terrorists arrested in Kenya when they tried to shoot down an El Al jet with a Sam-7 rocket as it took off from Nairobi Airport.

  After a stopover in Casablanca, and being refused permission to land in Khartoum, the plane flew to Entebbe in Uganda. From there the hijackers announced the aircraft would be blown up along with all its passengers unless their demands were met. The deadline was June 30.

  In Tel Aviv, in closed cabinet sessions, the vaunted public image of “no surrender” to terrorism wilted. Ministers favored freeing Israel’s PLO prisoners. Prime Minister Rabin produced a Shin Bet report to show there was a precedent for releasing convicted criminals. Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur announced he could not recommend military action due to insufficient intelligence from Entebbe. While their anguished deliberations continued, news came from Entebbe that the Jewish passengers had been separated from the others on board—those passengers had been released and were on their way to Paris.

  That had been the opening Mossad needed. Yitzhak Hofi, Mossad’s chief, in what was to be his finest hour, argued powerfully and passionately for a rescue to be mounted. He dusted down the plan Rafi Eitan had used to capture Eichmann. There were similarities: Rafi Eitan and his men had worked far from home in a hostile environment. They had improvised as they went along using bluff—the renowned Jewish chutzpah. It could be done again. Soaked in sweat, his voice hoarse from pleading and arguing, Hofi had stared around the cabinet room.

  “If we let our people die, it will open the floodgates. No Jew will be safe anywhere. Hitler would have won a victory from the grave!”

  “Very well,” Rabin had finally said. “We try.”

  As well as Kimche, every other strategist and planner in Mossad was mobilized. The first step was to open a safe communication channel between Tel Aviv and Nairobi; Hofi had nursed the unpublicized intelligence link between Mossad and its Kenyan counterpart introduced by Meir Amit. The link started to bear immediate results. Half a dozen katsas descended on Nairobi and were installed in a Kenyan intelligence service safe house. They would form the bridgehead for the main assault. Meantime Kimche had overcome another problem. Any rescue mission would require a fuel stop at Nairobi. Working the phone, he obtained Kenya’s approval in a matter of hours, granted “on humanitarian grounds.”

  But there was still the formidable problem of reaching Entebbe. The PLO had established the airport as their own entry point to Uganda, from where the Organization ran its own operation against the pro-Israeli white supremacist regime in South Africa. Idi Amin, Uganda’s despotic dictator, had actually given the PLO the residence of the Israeli ambassador as a headquarters after breaking off diplomatic relations with Jerusalem in 1972.

  Kimche knew it was essential to know if the PLO were still in the country. Their battle-hardened guerrillas would be a formidable force to overcome in the short time allowed for the actual rescue mission : the Israeli forces could only be on the ground for minutes, otherwise they ran the risk of a powerful counterattack. Kimche sent two katsas from Nairobi by boat across Lake Victoria. They landed near Entebbe and found the PLO headquarters deserted; the Palestinians had recently moved on to Angola.

  Then, with the stroke of luck any operation needs, one of the Kenyan security officers who had accompanied the katsas discovered that one of his wife’s relatives was actually one of the men guarding the hostages. The Kenyan inveigled himself into the airport and was able to see that the hostages were all alive, but he counted fifteen very tense and nervous guards. The information was radioed to Tel Aviv.

  Meanwhile, two other katsas, both qualified pilots, hired a Cessna and flew from Nairobi, ostensibly to photograph Lake Victoria for a holiday brochure. Their aircraft passed directly over Entebbe Airport, enabling one katsa to obtain good photographs of the runway and adjoining buildings. The film was flown to Tel Aviv. There, Kimche recommended yet another strategy to confuse the hijackers.

  During several telephone conversations with Amin’s palace, Israeli negotiators in Tel Aviv made it clear their government was ready to accept the hijacker’s terms. A diplomat in a European consulate in Uganda was used to add credibility to this apparent surrender by being called “in confidence” to see if he could negotiate suitable wording the hijackers would accept. Kimche told the envoy, “It must be something not too demeaning to Israel but also not too impossible for the hijackers to accept.” The diplomat hurried to the airport with the news and began to draft suitable words. He was still doing so as Operation Thunderball moved to the final stages.

  An unmarked Israeli Boeing 707 to be used as a flying hospital landed at Nairobi Airport, flown by IDF pilots who knew Entebbe Airport. Meantime six Mossad katsas had surrounded that airport; each man carried a high-frequency radio and an electronic device that would jam the radar in the control tower. It had never before been tried under combat conditions.

  Fifty Israeli paratroopers, under cover of darkness, left the hospital plane and went full speed to Lake Victoria. Inflating their rubber boats, they rowed across the water to wait close to the Ugandan shore, ready to storm into Entebbe Airport. In Tel Aviv, the rescue mission had been rehearsed to perfection; when the time came, a force of C-130 Hercules transporters crossed the Red Sea, headed south, refueled at Nairobi, and then, flying just above the African treetops, swept down on Entebbe Airport.

  The radar jammer worked perfectly. The airport authorities were still trying to work out what had happened when the three Hercules transporters and the hospital plane landed. Commandos raced into the building where the hostages were held. By then they were only Jews. All other nationalities had been freed by Amin, enjoying his moment of strutting the world stage. The paratroopers waiting in support were never called into action. They rowed back across the lake and returned to Nairobi. There they would be picked up by another Israeli transporter and flown home.

  Within five minutes—two full minutes less than the time allowed—the hostages were free and all the terrorists were killed, along with sixteen Ugandan soldiers guarding the prisoners. The attack force lost one officer, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, the elder brother of the future prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu. He would say that his own hard line against all terrorists came as a result of the death of Yonatan. Three hostages also died.

  David Kimche’s wish for a headline-making riposte to hijackers had been more than met. The rescue at Entebbe was an episode that, even more than the capture of Adolf Eichmann, came to be seen as Mossad’s calling card.

  Increasingly, Kimche found himself ever more immersed in Mossad’s efforts against the PLO. This deadly struggle was fought beyond the borders of Israel, on the streets of European cities. Kimche was one of the strategists who prepared the ground for Mossad’s own assassins, the kidons. They struck in Paris, Munich, Cyprus, and Athens. For Kimche, the killings were remote; he was like the bomber pilot who does not see where the bombs fall. The deaths helped to foster within Mossad a continuing mood of invincibility: the superior information coming from its strategists meant the kidons were always one step ahead of the enemy.

  One morning Kimche arrived at work to find his colleagues in a state of near shock. One of their most experienced katsas had been assassinated in Madrid by a PLO gunman. The assassin had been a contact the katsa was developing in an effort to penetrate the group.

  But there was no time to mourn. Every available hand was turned to the task of fighting fire with fire. For Kimche it was a time when “we did not expect to be shown any mercy and showed none in return.”

  The relentless pressure continued to find new ways to get close to the PLO leadership and disc
over enough about its inner workings to assassinate its leaders. For Kimche, “cutting off the head was the only way to stop the tail wagging.” Yasser Arafat was the first head on the kidon target list.

  Another and more serious threat had begun to focus Kimche’s mind: the possibility of a second full-scale Arab war, led by Egypt, against Israel. But Mossad was a lone voice within the Israeli intelligence community. Kimche’s concerns, echoed by his superiors, were flatly rejected by Aman, military intelligence. Its strategists pointed out that Egypt had just expelled its twenty thousand Soviet military advisers, which should be interpreted as a clear-cut indication that Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, was looking for a political solution in the Middle East.

  Kimche remained unconvinced. From all the information crossing his desk, he grew more certain that Sadat would launch a preemptive strike—simply because Arab demands would be impossible for Israel to accept: Egypt wanted back conquered land and the creation of a Palestinian homeland within Israel. Kimche believed that even if these concessions were granted, the PLO would still continue its murderous campaign to drive Israel to its knees.

  Kimche’s alarm grew when Sadat replaced his war minister with a more hawkish figure whose first act was to reinforce Egypt’s defenses along the Suez Canal. Egyptian commanders were also making regular visits to other Arab capitals to enlist support. Sadat had signed a new arms-purchasing deal with Moscow.

  To Kimche the signs were all too ominous: “It was not a question of when war would come, only the day it would start.”

  But the intelligence chiefs of Aman continued to downplay the warnings coming from Mossad. They told the IDF commanders that, even if war looked like starting, there would be “at least a five-day warning period,” more than enough time for Israel’s air force to repeat its great success in the Six Day War.

  Kimche countered that most certainly the Arabs would have learned from past mistakes. He found himself branded a member of “a warobsessed Mossad,” an accusation that did not sit well with a man so careful of his every word. All he could do was to continue to assess the Egyptian preparations and try to judge a likely date for an attack.

  The broiling heat of that 1973 August in Tel Aviv gave way to a cooler September. The latest reports from Mossad katsas on the Sinai side of the Suez Canal showed that Egyptian preparations had gathered momentum. Army engineers were putting the final touches to pontoons for troops and armor to cross the waterway. When Mossad persuaded the Israeli foreign minister to raise the definitely worrying preparations at the United Nations, the Egyptian representative said soothingly, “These activities are routine.” To Kimche the words had “the same kind of credibility” as those uttered by the Japanese ambassador in Washington on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Yet the Egyptian explanation was accepted by Aman. All the more incredible to Kimche was that by October, wherever his probing eyes settled, there were yet more signs of brewing trouble; Libya had just nationalized Western oil companies; in the oil-producing Gulf states there was talk of cutting off all supplies to the West.

  Yet the strategists in Aman continued to lamentably misread the intelligence picture. When Israeli air force jets were attacked by MiGs over Syria—resulting in victory for the IDF due to their pilots’ tactical knowledge learned from the MiG stolen from Iraq—the downing of twelve Syrian aircraft was seen by Aman only as further evidence that, if the Arabs ever did go to war, they would be beaten just as soundly.

  On the night of October 5–6, Mossad received the most stark evidence yet that hostilities were imminent, perhaps only hours away. Its katsas and informers in Egypt were reporting that the Egyptian Military High Command had gone to red alert. The evidence could no longer be ignored.

  At 6:00 A.M. Mossad’s chief, Zvi Zamir, joined Aman intelligence chiefs in the defense ministry. The building was almost deserted: it was Yom Kippur, the holiest of all Jewish holidays, the day even nonpracticing Jews rested, when all public services, including the state radio, shut down. The radio had always been the means used to mobilize reserves in the event of a national emergency.

  Finally driven to action by the incontrovertible evidence Mossad presented, alarm bells began to sound all over Israel that a two-pronged attack—from Syria in the north and Egypt in the south—was about to engulf Israel.

  War began at 1:55 P.M. local time while the Israeli cabinet was in emergency session—assured by Aman’s strategists that hostilities would still only start at 6:00 P.M. The time turned out to have been pure guesswork.

  Never in the history of the Israeli intelligence community had there been such an inglorious failure to predict an event. The mass of impeccable evidence that David Kimche and others had provided had been totally ignored.

  After the war ended, with Israel once more snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, there was a massive purging of Aman’s upper echelons. Mossad once more ruled supreme over the intelligence community, though there was a key change there too: Zamir was removed as director general on the grounds he had not been sufficiently assertive against his Aman counterpart. His place was taken by Yitzhak Hofi.

  Kimche viewed his arrival with mixed feelings. In some ways Hofi was from a similar mold to Meir Amit: the same erect bearing, the same proven battlefield experience, the same incisive manner and total inability to suffer fools at any price. But Hofi was also blunt to the point of rudeness, and the tension between him and Kimche dated from the days they had instructed recruits, between their other duties, at the Mossad training school. Hofi, with his no-nonsense kibbutz mentality, had shown no patience with Kimche’s languid intellectualism and his refined English accent when addressing students. But Kimche was not only now a seasoned operative but Hofi’s deputy. He had been promoted to deputy director general shortly before Zamir left. Both Hofi and Kimche accepted they must put aside their personal differences to ensure Mossad continued operating with maximum efficiency.

  Kimche was given one of the most difficult tasks in Mossad: he was put in charge of the service’s “Lebanese account.” The country’s civil war had begun two years after the Yom Kippur War, and by the time Kimche took charge of “the account,” the Lebanese Christians were fighting a losing battle. Just as years before Salman had gone to the Israeli embassy in Paris to initiate the first steps in stealing the Iraqi MiG, so in September 1975 an emissary from the Christians had gone there asking Israel to supply arms to stop them being annihilated. The request ended up on Kimche’s desk. He saw an opportunity for Mossad to work its way into “the Lebanese woodwork.”

  He told Hofi that politically it made sense to “partly support” the Christians against the Muslims who were vowed to destroy Israel. Once more his interpretation was accepted. Israel would give the Christians sufficient arms to deal with the Muslims, but not enough to pose a threat to Israel. Mossad began to ship arms out of Israel into Lebanon. Next Kimche placed Mossad officers within the Christian command. They were ostensibly there to help maximize the use of the weapons. In reality the officers provided Kimche with a continuous flow of intelligence that enabled him to constantly chart the overall progress of the civil war. The information enabled Mossad to launch a number of successful attacks against PLO strongholds in southern Lebanon.

  But the service’s relationship with the Christians soured in January 1976, when Christian leaders invited in the Syrian army to lend additional support against the pro-Iranian Hezbollah. That group was seen in Damascus as a threat. Within days thousands of battle-hardened Syrian troops were in Lebanon and moving close to its borders with Israel. Too late the Christians found they had, in Kimche’s words, “behaved like Little Red Riding Hood, inviting in the wolf.”

  Once more the Lebanese Christians turned to Mossad for help. But Kimche realized his carefully constructed network to supply arms was insufficient. What was needed was a full-scale Israeli logistical operation. Scores of IDF tanks, antitank missiles, and other weapons were sent to the Christians. Lebanon’s civil war began to rag
e out of control.

  Under its cover, Kimche launched his own guerrilla battle against Israel’s bête noire, the PLO. Soon that had extended to fighting the Lebanese Shiites. Lebanon became a practice ground for Mossad to perfect its tactics, not only in assassinations, but in psychological warfare. It was a halcyon time for the men operating out of the featureless high-rise on King Saul Boulevard.

  Inside the building, relations between Kimche and Hofi were deteriorating. There were whispers of violent disagreements over operational matters; that Hofi feared Kimche wanted his job; that Kimche felt he was not properly appreciated for the undoubted contribution he was making. To this day, Kimche will not discuss such matters, only to say he “would never give a rumor respectability by commenting.”

  On a spring morning in 1980, David Kimche used his unrestricted access card, which had replaced the two keys, to access the headquarters building. Arriving in his office, he was told that Hofi wished to see him at once. Kimche strolled along the corridor to the director general’s office, knocked, and entered, closing the door behind him.

  What happened there has passed into Mossad legend, a tale of increasingly raised voices, of accusation and counteraccusation. The row lasted for twenty electrifying minutes. Then Kimche came out of the office, tight-lipped. His career in Mossad was finished. But his intelligence activities on behalf of Israel were about to enter a familiar arena, the United States. This time it would not involve the theft of nuclear materials, but the scandal that eventually became known as Irangate.

  After a period of considering his future, David Kimche had accepted the director generalship of the Israeli foreign ministry. The post was ideally suited to his ability to think his way into, and out of, a situation. It offered Kimche an opportunity to bring his skills to bear on the international stage far beyond Lebanon.