The Israeli Secret Services and the Struggle Against Terrorism
Page 6
However, Israel did not limit its response solely to defensive measures. Five weeks after the Lod massacre, Israel reintroduced its use of the war model in the form of a retaliation operation. This time, Ghassan Kanafani, a Palestinian writer who served as PFLP spokesman, was the target. He had claimed responsibility for the attack on behalf of the organization, and photographs of him and the three Japanese terrorists were sent to Beirut newspapers. Israeli public opinion was outraged at this display. On July 8, 1972, Kanafani left his house in one of the Beirut suburbs, accompanied by his seventeen-year-old niece, Lamees. When he started the engine of his Austin 1100, a grenade connected to the ignition switch exploded. The grenade acted as a detonator for a bomb containing three kilograms of plastic explosives hidden under the car’s front bumper. The car burst into flames, and both its occupants were killed.16 This would be the first in a long series of assassinations in 1972 and 1973.
MUNICH AND OPERATION WRATH OF GOD
Israel launched Operation Wrath of God, a series of assassinations of PLO officials in Europe (see figure 2.1), shortly after the attack by the Black September group on the Israeli athletic delegation to the Munich Olympics on September 5, 1972. At 4:00 a.m. that day, eight members of the Palestinian organization infiltrated the Olympic Village and broke into the apartments where the Israeli male athletes were staying. In exchange for the release of the hostages, the terrorists demanded the liberation of more than two hundred Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons, as well as two more who were being held by the Germans. The German authorities felt that their first priority was to distance the events from the Olympic Village in order to ensure the resumption of the Olympic competitions. They reached an understanding with the terrorists, according to which they would be transferred to Tunisia with the hostages, and then negotiations would be continued. At the same time, the German police prepared a rescue operation. Their plan was to be executed after the landing of the two helicopters that transferred the terrorists and hostages from the Olympic Village to Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base. However, the operation was an utter failure. In the exchange of gunfire, the athletes were killed, most of them while they were inside the helicopters with their hands still tied. Five of the terrorists were killed and three others were caught alive. The latter three were released on October 30 after two Black September operatives kidnapped a Lufthansa aircraft on its way from Beirut to Frankfurt and demanded that West Germany free their three comrades in return for releasing the hostages.17 Later West Germany was blamed for collaborating with Black September in staging the hijacking. The German authorities wanted to get rid of the incarcerated terrorists.
The first assassination of Operation Wrath of God was carried out less than two months after the tragic events in Munich. On October 16, 1972, Abdel Zwaiter, a senior operative of the Black September group stationed in Rome, made his way home from visiting a woman friend. He was on his way to the building where his apartment was located, not far from the Piazza Avellino. When he approached the building entrance, around 10:30 p.m., two Mossad operatives shot him at close range. After confirming that Zwaiter was dead, they dashed into a Fiat car waiting for them across the street. A few days after the assassination, the PLO announced that Zwaiter had not been involved in any aspect of the attack against the Israeli athletes.18
FIGURE 2.1 OPERATION WRATH OF GOD AND PALESTINIAN RETALIATION OPERATIONS
Source: NSSC Dataset on Palestinian Terrorism, www.nssc.haifa.ac.il
In many respects, most of which have not yet received sufficient attention, the outcomes of the Wrath of God operation could be labeled as problematic. One important example is how the operation undermined Israel’s intelligence capabilities. In the late 1960s, in light of the increasing activities of various Palestinian organizations in Western Europe, Mossad was successful in casting a wide network of informants from Palestinian communities in several countries. It also infiltrated the PLO elite in Europe by recruiting and activating key figures from among the organizations’ activists and their close associates. Syrian journalist Khader Kano was one of them. He had fled from Syria to Kuwait in 1964 after receiving death threats in the wake of his criticism of the regime in Damascus. A year later he moved to Germany and from there continued on to Paris. There Kano built strong friendships with PLO activists. Mossad recruited him, and he became an important source of information. Despite constant warnings by his operators, Kano did not take strict precautions and maintained a lavish lifestyle. He lived in the prestigious Sixteenth Arrondissement, often hired a chauffeur, and never told his Palestinian friends about the source of his funds. On November 12, 1972, less than a month after the assassination of Zwaiter, three Black September operatives shot him dead at the entrance to his home.19
This was not the only case. Palestinian counterintelligence labored tirelessly to locate and strike at European-based Mossad intelligence-gathering officers and their informants. If one of the goals of Operation Wrath of God was indeed an attempt to deter the PLO, Israel fell short of meeting it. The PLO did not submit quietly but in fact repaid Mossad in kind. Baruch Cohen, an intelligence-gathering officer who posed as a businessman by the name of Moshe Hanan Yishai, operated a network of Palestinian informants, many of them students who supplied a steady flow of information on the PLO’s political activities in Europe. Toward the end of 1972, with the escalation in the eliminations of PLO people in European capitals, Abu Iyad, head of PLO intelligence, learned about Cohen’s network and converted some of his informants into double agents. They provided Cohen with false information, and finally one of them, Samir Ahmad, killed him.20
Another illustration of the futility of that operation in its attempt to damage Fatah’s operational mechanisms was the series of worldwide reprisal attacks against Israeli targets after almost every one of the assassinations. Just two weeks after the Zwaiter assassination, fourteen letter bombs were sent to Israeli diplomats and Jewish figures in the United Kingdom. In the following weeks another 150 envelopes laden with explosives were sent to Israeli and Jewish figures all over the world. Only the safeguarding procedures which had been enforced by the GSS due to prior attempts to send letter bombs to Israeli embassies, prevented casualties.21
The Palestinian response was also quick after the assassination of Mahmud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris. On December 8, 1972, he picked up the phone in his apartment. He identified himself by name, answering the question of the man who was on the other side of the phone line. This was a fatal mistake; a few seconds later an explosive attached to the underside of the table exploded. He died of his wounds a few days later. A little more than two weeks later, in the early afternoon hours of December 28, four Palestinians infiltrated the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok and took six Israeli diplomats hostage, including the ambassador. In return for the release of the hostages, they demanded that Israel free thirty-six members of Fatah held in Israeli prisons. After more than twenty-four hours of negotiations, the abductors instead agreed to release the hostages, in return for which they would be flown to Egypt.22
In the wake of the attack in Bangkok, security measures at Israeli embassies were greatly intensified, transforming them virtually into fortified strongholds. But Israel also continued to respond with offensive actions, carrying on Operation Wrath of God as Mossad operatives assassinated Hussein Abad Al-Chir, the Fatah representative in Cyprus, on January 25, 1973. The retaliation attack plotted this time by the Black September group could have been very painful. In March 1973, during Prime Minister Golda Meir’s visit to New York, Black September operatives succeeded in parking three car bombs along the route where Meir’s convoy was scheduled to pass. Simply by chance, the explosives failed to detonate. Israel countered with a series of eight assassinations in April and June 1973, while the Palestinians came back by attacking El Al offices at Athens and Rome airports in June and August, illustrating again the futility of the Wrath of God operations in damaging the Palestinian terrorism infrastructure, as well as its inability to
deter its leaders.23
The payback motivation is also questionable. Zwaiter was not the only target whose ties to the Munich massacre were not fully established. Basil Al-Kubaysi was a professor of law who had earned degrees from Canadian and American universities and had lectured at the American University in Beirut. Using his standing as a Palestinian intellectual, Kubaysi helped transfer munitions among Fatah cells throughout Europe. Despite these activities, Kubaysi’s importance in the Fatah operational network in general and in Black September in particular was quite minimal. He just happened to be an easy target. He had a high public profile and was seen in public almost every day. On April 6, 1973, he was dining at the Café de la Paix, opposite the Opera House in Paris. After finishing his meal, he walked toward the Piper Hotel, at Rue de l’Arcade 6. Two men were waiting for Kubaysi on the corner of Plaza Madeleine, and two others were watching the corner from a car parked nearby. When the men on the corner saw Kubaysi approaching, they readied their weapons. To their surprise, Kubaysi changed his mind, and instead of continuing straight toward the hotel, he decided to enjoy the pleasures of a local prostitute. The Mossad agents watched as Kubaysi bargained with the woman. A few seconds later he entered her car, which disappeared in the bustling traffic. The Mossad team wondered if this unexpected delay was reason enough to call off the operation. The team commander asked them to wait, figuring that the prostitute would return her client to the plaza shortly, to the exact spot where she had picked him up. Sure enough, less than twenty minutes later the car returned, and Kubaysi got out and headed toward the hotel. The two men blocked his path, and when he was very close to them, they opened fire. Silencers apparently muffled the sound of the shots. The surprised Kubaysi managed to shout “Non, ne faites pas cela!” (“No, don’t do it!”) before collapsing to the ground in a pool of his own blood. The two men quickly entered the car, which merged with the traffic and sped away.24
The most complicated mission during the course of Operation Wrath of God, in which three senior Fatah members—Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Muhammad Yusef Najjar—were killed, seems to have had little connection to Munich. Operation Spring of Youth was a high-risk attack executed on the night of April 9, 1973. Naval commando boats brought Sayeret Matkal and Paratroopers reconnaissance units to the Beirut shore. From there they were taken by Mossad operatives to the city’s Verdun neighborhood, where they forced their way into the apartments of three senior Fatah operatives and killed them. The modus operandi in all three instances was the same. The doors of the apartments were blasted open with explosive charges and Sayeret Matkal soldiers entered the apartments and killed the Fatah men after a short exchange of gunfire. The next stage of the operation was meant to include the destruction of one of the other buildings inhabited by PLO members, but the plan was changed after heavy gun battles began to develop. During the evacuation of the Israeli forces, two paratroopers were killed.25
In this case, too, the desire to avenge the PLO’s actions against Israel seemed to be more imperative than the desire to harm Fatah capabilities. Kamal Nasser, for example, was not even directly involved in terrorist activities against Israel. He was one of the organization’s senior spokesmen and in this capacity often appeared in the Arabic and international media. The attacks on the two others, despite their important positions, would have no real impact on the organization’s operational capabilities. Even though Yusef Najjar, a lawyer by profession, was number two in Fatah’s organizational hierarchy, he was primarily a political figure whose involvement in the direct planning of attacks against Israel was minor. Kamal Adwan was in charge of the organization’s mechanisms in the West Bank, which were responsible for launching terrorist attacks on Israel from that area. However, terrorist activities from inside the West Bank during those years were actually in decline, and were less of a problem for Israel.
Operation Wrath of God ended de facto on July 21, 1973, with an event that many still consider one of Mossad’s most prominent failures. A team of Mossad agents was conducting a surveillance of a senior PLO operative, who had flown from the organization’s headquarters in Geneva to a small Norwegian town, Lillehammer. They discovered that he had met several times there with a suspicious person. The agents rapidly came to the conclusion that this person was actually Ali Hassan Salameh, the head of the Black September Organization. They were not aware that this person was in fact a waiter by the name of Ahmed Bouchiki. He was an Algerian-born Moroccan, but he had no relation to Black September. That morning, as Bouchiki stepped down from a bus escorted by his pregnant wife, two Mossad operatives shot him thirteen times from close range and killed him. The fiasco did not end in a case of mistaken identification. The Mossad agents were caught as they returned the rented car to the airport. They did not even try to change the license numbers of the hired cars or merely abandon them. In addition, one of the arrested agents, Dan Arbel, was claustrophobic. In exchange for being taken out of the small cell where he was put, he revealed many details of the operation. This included Mossad methods of operations, the names of his colleagues—who were arrested as a result—and detailed information about former operations of Mossad in Europe. For the first time, there was clear evidence connecting Israel to the series of assassinations of Palestinians all over Europe.26
Ali Hassan Salameh himself did not escape the destiny Mossad had designated for him. In the morning hours of June 22, 1979, a Chevrolet van and a Land Rover made their way slowly down the narrow lane of Verdean Street in Beirut, turning into Marie Curie Street. A few second later, a Volkswagen parked by the side of the road exploded as the two cars passed by. The eight men in the two cars died almost immediately, among them Hassan Salameh. None of the passersby who gathered in the street saw the young woman who was observing the entire event from the window of the upper floor of one of the high buildings bordering the lane. Just few years later it would be revealed that this young woman, Erica Chambers, who pushed the button that triggered the explosives in the car bomb, was part of a Mossad team that operated in Beirut and had targeted Hassan Salameh.
The original goal of Operation Wrath of God was to strike at the heads of Black September, but over the course of time the circle of assassinations widened to include leaders of other Palestinian organizations. There were practical reasons for this. While many Black September members found refuge in Arab countries, senior activists from other organizations traveled among European capitals, making them easy targets. During the seven years of the campaign, twelve Palestinians associated with the PLO were killed. If the heads of the Israeli security establishment had hoped that the assassinations would lead to a renunciation of terrorism by Palestinian organizations, this did not happen. Palestinian terrorism only intensified and became more lethal, as the following decades bear witness.27
Although the defensive model had proven to be highly effective and actually forced terrorists to realize that the risk involved in hijacking planes was greater than the chances of success, leading them to abandon that method of operation altogether, this model was still not completely assimilated.28 The idea of exploring the reconciliatory model by trying to address the grievances of the Palestinians did not even cross the minds of policymakers at the time.
CHAPTER THREE
RESCUING HOSTAGES
IN THIS CHAPTER I will focus on four case studies of hostage-rescue situations that took place in the years following Operation Wrath of God. The very fact that Palestinian groups persisted in perpetrating such attacks casts further doubt on the deterring effect of the Israeli war model. Here I will look into the causes that led Israeli policymakers to order elite military units, which had little experience with hostage crises, to perform such rescue operations. Furthermore, I will address the paradoxical situation in which the Israeli leadership did not deviate from its original position, despite the tragic consequences of several rescue attempts and a formal commission’s clear recommendation to transfer the responsibility for responding to such scenarios from the IDF to the police
.
MA’ALOT
On Sunday, May 13, 1974, three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine crossed the border from Lebanon into Israel. When they reached the road connecting the town of Ma’alot with Kibbutz Sasa, they set up an ambush near Moshav Tzuriel. They first attacked a van carrying Arab women home from their jobs in Kiryat Ata. They killed one passenger and wounded two of her friends. Fortunately, the driver kept a cool head and did not stop until the vehicle’s motor broke down. After the shootings, the terrorists continued on foot in the direction of Ma’alot. At 3:30 a.m. they broke into the home of the Cohen family and killed a mother and father and one of their children. After that, they left the house and made their way to the Netiv Meir School. At about 4:00 a.m., they ran into Yaakov Kadosh, a fifty-four-year-old man who was on his way to the synagogue for morning prayers. He wished them a good morning. They reciprocated in Hebrew, but a few seconds later the terrorists opened fire, critically wounding him. Three cars were parked in the school parking lot and in one of them sat Yitzhak Vaknin, a teacher chaperoning a group of 102 high-school students. They were from a religious public school in Tsefat and were spending the night at the Ma’alot school while on a field trip in northern Israel. The terrorists threatened Vaknin with their weapons and ordered him to lead them into the school. They quickly took control of the building; two cell members occupied the upper floors and one was left to guard the entrance. The terrorists woke up the children and shouted at them in Arabic and Hebrew to leave the rooms. The bus driver, a number of teachers, and a few students took advantage of the confusion and jumped out through one of the classroom windows into the schoolyard below. From there they ran to the town center and alerted the security forces. In the meanwhile, the abductors herded the rest of the hostages—eighty-five children and four adults—into a classroom.