Limon, with a sleight of hand worthy of a card player, made his move. On November 11, he met with shipyard officials. He listened to their improved offer of compensation and said he was still not satisfied. The officials were astonished; their new offer was a generous one. While they contemplated what to do next, Limon hurried to Paris. Waiting there was Ole Siem. After the two men met, Limon telephoned the shipyard officials to say he would be in touch with them “in a few days.” Within the hour, Siem was seated in the office of General Louis Bonte, the French government’s arms salesman. Siem said he had heard that there “are some gunboats for sale that can be converted to drill for oil.”
Timing his intervention to perfection, Limon at that moment called Bonte to say he was in Paris and was ready to accept a final offer in compensation. The figure he proposed was the one the Cherbourg shipyard officials had offered. Bonte told Limon he was “in negotiation” and would call back. The general then turned to Siem and revealed the offer Limon had agreed to accept but said it was too high for the government to agree to pay. Siem promptly increased Limon’s offer by 5 percent. Bonte called back Limon and said his offer was most agreeable. Bonte believed he had made a good deal in ridding France of a thorny problem. Israel would get its compensation and France would have made a 5 percent profit.
He only had two questions for Ole Siem. Were the boats going to Norway? Could Siem guarantee they would not be reexported after their oil-exploration activities? Siem gave an unequivocal guarantee on both counts. Bonte accepted that, to avoid press inquiries about the site of the oil fields—a sensitive commercial matter in an industry renowned for its secrecy—the removal of the boats from Cherbourg would be done discreetly. A departure date was set for Christmas Eve, 1969, when Cherbourg would be celebrating the start of the holiday season.
There was still a month to go—and Meir Amit was only too well aware that that was more than enough time for things to go wrong. There would be a need to provide 120 Israeli sailors to crew the boats for the three-thousand-mile voyage from Cherbourg to Haifa. To send that many men at one time would most certainly alert the French security service. Once more the inventive Meir Amit had the answer.
He decided only two sailors at a time would travel together to cities all over Europe before going on to Cherbourg. The sailors were instructed not to stay in the port’s hotels for more than a night before moving to another one. They all traveled on Israeli passports so that, in case they were caught, they could not be charged with possessing forged travel documents. Nevertheless, Meir Amit knew the risks were still high. “It just needed one suspicious French policeman to ask why so many Jews were coming to Cherbourg for Christmas and the whole operation could be blown.”
By December 23, the sailors had all arrived in Cherbourg. Scattered around the town, they listened to the incessant carols; some who had been born and raised in Jerusalem joined in the singing.
In Tel Aviv, a relieved Meir Amit watched other problems come and go. The question of providing enough supplies for eight days at sea had been solved by the operation’s supply officer visiting every shop in Cherbourg. But whenever shopkeepers pressed on him Christmas jambon, he politely refused. The quarter of a million liters of fuel had been smuggled on board in drums and hidden belowdecks. The one great imponderable was the weather. The boats would have to sail across the Bay of Biscay in winter conditions that could sink them. Meir Amit would recall that in Tel Aviv: “What we prayed for was Dunkirk weather. We had sent a meteorologist to Cherbourg and he monitored every forecast out of England, France, in Cherbourg and Spain.”
The hours ticked slowly by until finally it was Christmas Eve. The forecast in Cherbourg was for rain gusting out of the southwest. Nevertheless, the order was given to sail at 8:30 that night. By 7:30 P.M. the crews were all on board. But the weather worsened. A new departure time was set for 10:30 P.M. That came and went, halted again by the weather. From Tel Aviv came urgent coded signals: Sail no matter what the conditions.
In Cherbourg, the ranking Israeli naval officer ignored the pressure; for him the lives of his men were more important at that moment. In his command boat, he sat silently watching the meteorologist feverishly studying his weather charts. At midnight the weatherman announced: “The winds will drop and veer northerly in two hours. They will not be so strong and be behind us. We can go.”
At exactly 2:30 A.M. on Christmas Day, the boats’ engines started and the crafts headed slowly out to sea. Seven days later, on New Year’s Day, they sailed into Haifa Harbor.
Among those waiting on the quayside was Meir Amit. For him the New Year could not have had a better start. But he also knew President Charles de Gaulle would never forgive Israel for what had happened.
So it had proven to be the case. When Mossad came hunting Middle Eastern terrorists in Paris and other French cities, its katsas were as closely watched as any terrorist by the French security service. Worse, pro-Arab officers in the SDECE often tipped off the PLO that Mossad was about to launch a counterstrike. Too often a terrorist would slip away.
The most notorious of these was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, whose activities had earned him the nickname “Carlos the Jackal.” In Paris, he was the proverbial gun for hire in the service of one of the PLO breakaway groups based in Syria. His exploits had made him an admired figure in the Marxist underground press that flourished in Europe. Women found his playboy habits thrilling—the more so when he seemed able to flit at will in and out of the traps Mossad set to kill him. One day he would be on the Riviera sunning himself with a girl, the next he would be spotted in London with a group of Middle Eastern terrorists, helping them lay their plans against other Arab groups and, of course, Israel. Carlos and they operated without interference from Britain’s police and intelligence services on the understanding they would do no harm to British citizens. By the time Mossad was in a position to kill Carlos, he was back on the Continent, or had flown to Damascus, Baghdad, or other Arab countries to stoke up further mischief making.
Keeping track of Carlos long enough for Mossad to be able to assassinate him had become yet another task assigned to Ismail Sowan during his time in Paris.
His overall contribution to the war Mossad waged in France was considerable, allowing its katsas and kidons to claim spectacular successes: a PLO forgery factory producing false documents was firebombed; weapons caches were destroyed; couriers were intercepted and murdered; explosives smuggled in from Eastern Europe were blown up; in a dozen and more ways, Mossad fought fire with fire as a result of the intelligence Sowan provided.
In January 1984, Sowan was told by Adam, his Mossad controller, he was being sent to England, where he would pose as a mature student studying for a science degree. His new task would be to penetrate the PLO in London and discover everything he could about its active service unit, Force 17. It was now run by Abdul-Rahid Mustapha, who was using Britain as a base. Mustapha was on Mossad’s assassination list.
Ismail Sowan told the PLO office manager in Paris he had completed his French studies—a French sayan had produced a forged diploma to confirm this in case he was asked for proof, though no one did—and he wished to go to England to continue his quest for an engineering science degree. He even managed to slip in a reminder that the qualification would make him “even more useful when it came to bomb making.”
The prospect of adding another bomb maker to the PLO’s team of such experts was always welcome, and never more so than in 1984. The PLO leadership needed to show the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that they were not forgotten. Tens of thousands were suffering increasing hardship under Israeli occupation; they could not understand why Yasser Arafat did not do more to help them in a practical way: rhetoric was one thing, action another.
Mossad knew that Arafat was under growing pressure to support the peace overtures that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had started to make toward Israel. In Syria, the always unpredictable regime had decided to cool its relationship with the various Pales
tinian factions, and had imprisoned hundreds of its fighters. President Assad wanted to show the Americans he was not the troublemaker the world believed.
That only increased the feeling among the rank-and-file PLO in the camps that they would be cast adrift by the Arab world, shunted from place to place, left to fend for themselves. There was ugly talk of being betrayed by their own leadership. The Israelis continued to exploit this, broadcasting throughout the occupied territories that the PLO had assets of $5 billion, invested all over the world. Arafat had also become the victim of a separate smear campaign, created by Mossad’s experts in psychological warfare, which claimed he used some of the money to satisfy his liking for nubile young boys. The rumor was fed into the refugee camps and though not widely believed, it did have some effect. Arafat, in a shrewd move, ordered the seventeen PLO offices to leak a story that he had a healthy appetite for women—which was true.
For the PLO office manager in Paris, the idea that Sowan would use his hoped-for degree to become a bomb maker was indeed welcome news, and sufficient reason to provide Ismail’s train fare to England and a week’s living expenses. Sowan was also given five hundred pounds by Adam and told he must find a job to pay for his studies in Britain to avoid any suspicion.
Ismail arrived in London on a blustery day in February 1984, traveling on a Jordanian passport provided by Mossad. He had a second Canadian passport concealed in the false bottom of his suitcase. He had been told to use it only if he had to leave Britain in a hurry. Concealed with the passport was Mossad’s briefing about Abdul-Rahid Mustapha and the Force 17 he commanded.
The unit had originally been created as Yasser Arafat’s personal security force. Its name came from the number of Arafat’s telephone extension in the old PLO headquarters in Beirut. At one stage in Lebanon, Force 17 had grown to a ragtag army of over a thousand fighters; one of its units had been the notorious Black September group that had carried out the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Shortly before the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon and resettle in Tunis, Force 17’s original commander, Ali Hassan Salameh, was killed by the car bomb arranged by Rafi Eitan. In Tunis, Arafat had faced hard realities. He was not only hunted by Mossad, but had become increasingly threatened by other Arab extremists. Abu Nidal, who claimed he was the authentic voice of the armed struggle, said there could be no victory until Arafat was eliminated. Arafat’s response had been to restructure Force 17 into a close-knit unit with a dual purpose: to continue to protect him, and to launch well-prepared attacks against its enemies, beginning with Israel. Mustapha was given command of Force 17. In Tunis, his men were trained by both Chinese and Russian Special Forces in guerrilla warfare. In 1983, Mustapha began to travel to Britain to recruit mercenaries.
London was awash with former SAS men and regular army veterans who had seen service in Northern Ireland and were looking for a new outlet for their killing skills. The pay as PLO instructors was good and many of the mercenaries had a strong anti-Semitic attitude. A number signed on and traveled to Tunisia to work in PLO training camps. Other instructors were drawn from the ranks of former French foreign legionnaires and, at one stage, even included a former CIA officer, Frank Terpil, who would later become briefly involved with Mehmet Ali Agca, the fanatic who shot Pope John Paul II.
For a whole year Mustapha had slipped in and out of Britain without MI5 or the Special Branch even realizing who he was. When Mossad informed them, the only action taken was for an MI5 officer to remind the PLO office in London it would be closed and its staff expelled at the first hint they were engaged in terrorist activity against Britain. But they could continue to fulminate against Israel.
An intriguing sidelight to the propaganda war came when Bassam Abu-Sharif, then Arafat’s chief media spokesman, was invited to meet novelist Jeffrey Archer. The PLO man would remember that Archer had explained “how we should develop and manage our media relations, how to organize our political activity, how to set about building contacts with British politicians and mobilize public opinion. I am extremely impressed.”
That meeting ensured that Archer’s name found its way onto Mossad’s computers.
To the furious Israelis it appeared Mustapha was under the protection of the British authorities and that any attempt to deal with him in Britain could have repercussions for Mossad.
Ismail Sowan’s task was to try to lead Mustapha into a trap outside the country, preferably in the Middle East, where waiting Mossad kidons could execute him. Sowan had been told by Adam in Paris he would work under the guidance of his Mossad controllers based at the Israeli embassy in London. The first was Arie Regev. The other was Jacob Barad, who looked after Israel’s commercial interests. A third London-based katsa, not working under diplomatic cover, was Bashar Samara, who would be Sowan’s main contact. Samara had asked a sayan employed by a London house-letting agency to rent an apartment for Sowan in the Maida Vale district of the city.
A few days after arriving in London, Sowan set up his first contact with Samara. The couple met beneath the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus. Each carried a copy of the Daily Mirror, newly acquired by Robert Maxwell. Using the technique of exchanging newspapers that had worked in Paris, Sowan obtained his six hundred pounds first month’s salary, together with instructions on how to find office work at the PLO office in London.
Many of those who worked there wanted to be on the cutting edge of the action, such as carrying messages to various PLO cells around Europe, flying to the Organization’s Tunis headquarters with particularly important information, and afterward waiting for hours for the chance just to glimpse Arafat. These young, committed revolutionaries had no interest in routine office work, clerking or filing, reading the newspapers, manning the phones. When Sowan volunteered for this work, he was promptly taken on at the London office.
Within a few days he had met Mustapha. Over tiny cups of sweet mint tea, they quickly developed a rapport. Both had a common background of having lived through the Israeli bombardment of Beirut. They had walked the same streets with the same quickness of eye and mind, passed the same gutted buildings pocked with so many holes they looked like latticework. Both had slept in a different bed each night and waited for the dawn when, over the crackling loudspeakers, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Each of them had taken his turn on PLO checkpoint duty in Beirut, waving the Palestinian ambulances through, stopping everyone else, and only running for cover when the whine of Israeli aircraft once more filled their ears. They had laughed over the memory of the old Beirut saying, “If you hear the bomb explode, you’re still alive.” So many memories; the cries of the dead and dying, the wail of the women, their looks of helpless hatred at the sky.
Sowan and Mustapha spent a whole day in communion with their past. Finally, Mustapha asked what Sowan was doing in London. To further his education so as to better serve the PLO, Ismail replied. In turn, he asked Mustapha what had brought him to England.
The question unleashed a flow of revelations. Mustapha described Force 17 exploits: how its commandos had been about to hijack an Israeli aircraft filled with German tourists when Arafat canceled the mission for fear of antagonizing German opinion. But Mustapha had carried the war against Israel into Cyprus and Spain. Ismail knew that everything his companion boasted of would only make Mossad more determined to kill him.
They agreed to meet in a few days at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner, London’s traditional venue for all kinds of opinion to be freely aired. Ismail Sowan called the special number he had been given if he had urgent news. Bashar Samara answered. They arranged to meet in Regent Street. Strolling among the lunchtime office workers, Sowan reported what Mustapha had told him. Samara said he would be at Speakers’ Corner to photograph Mustapha and then tail him wherever he went.
Mustapha did not keep the appointment. It would be weeks before Sowan saw him again. By that time, Ismail had been accepted as a student by a college in Bath, the spa resort. Twice a week he traveled to London to visit t
he PLO office to carry out his clerking. On one trip, Mustapha was there.
Once more the two men spoke over endless cups of mint tea. From his briefcase, Mustapha produced an illustrated book recording the history of Force 17. He boasted over one hundred thousand copies were to be distributed to Palestinians. Leafing through it, Ismail saw a picture of Mustapha taken in Lebanon. With a flourish, Mustapha signed it and presented the book to Ismail. Once more they arranged to meet, but Mustapha again broke the appointment.
Meanwhile, Sowan had handed over the book to Samara at what became a regular meeting place, the Bath railway station. The katsa would travel down on one train and return to London on the next, taking with him anything Sowan had learned at the PLO office and handing over his monthly stipend of six hundred pounds to the informer.
For almost a year their relationship continued in this manner. By then, Sowan had met an English girl named Carmel Greensmith. She agreed to marry him. But on the eve of the ceremony, Sowan had still not settled on a best man.
Making another trip to the PLO office, he again met Mustapha, who, as usual, did not explain where he had been. Mustapha had with him a bundle of tear sheets from the London-published Arab newspaper, Al-Qabas. Each page contained a biting cartoon mocking Yasser Arafat. The newspaper was subsidized by the Kuwaiti ruling family, long an enemy of the PLO.
The cartoons were the work of the Arab world’s most celebrated political artist, Naji Al-Ali. Based in London, he had waged a one-man war against Arafat, portraying the PLO leader as venal, self-serving, and politically inept. The cartoons had established Al-Qabas as the voice of opposition to Arafat.
Mustapha threw the tear sheets on the table and said Al-Ali deserved to die and his Kuwaiti paymasters taught a lesson.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 35
