Thousands of hours of manpower, in field and office, were devoted to the hunt for Salameh—it was one of Israeli intelligence’s longest and most costly missions. HUMINT sources were asked time and again about the man, their ability to get close to him, his schedule, his habits, and his plans. The ears of Military Intelligence, Unit 8200, were instructed to intercept his calls or pick up any mention of his name. A new Mossad computer system searched satellite communication systems for the words “Ali Hassan Salameh” or “Abu-Hassan,” recording all such conversations both in Israel and abroad. The Ali Hassan Salameh search, which was costly from a number of different perspectives, was a project the Mossad and Caesarea conducted with everything they had.
His name came up in covert meetings the Mossad conducted with Lebanese Christian Phalangist leaders, who were in close contact and even friendly with Salameh. They were asked very gently to keep the Mossad abreast of his actions. In March 1976, the Mossad held a secret meeting with Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Christian forces in Lebanon, and Military Intelligence officers in the seaside Israeli town of Herzaliya. The future president of Lebanon was asked to provide details of Salameh’s schedule and his daily routine. Gemayel promised to help, but his vow, like many of the Phalangists’ promises, was hollow. Fulfilling it promised no foreseeable benefit.
Ali Hassan Salameh was born in 1942, the firstborn child of Hassan Salameh, an important gang leader in British Palestine. His father was notorious for his murderous zeal during the Jewish-Arab riots in the 1930s. By 1939, after the fall of the Great Arab Revolt, he was forced to flee Palestine, an enormous £10,000 bounty on his head. He traveled through Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon with his young wife before returning to Palestine. Two weeks after Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declared independence, he fell in battle. A mortar shell pierced his lung as he led three hundred men in a charge on a village recently captured by Israel. He was thirty-seven.
Ali was only six years old when he lost his father. He lived with his mother, Um-Ali (“mother of Ali”), and two younger sisters, Nidal and Jihad, in Beirut. They lived in prosperity until Ali was sixteen and the family decided to leave tumultuous Lebanon—refugees a second time over. The young Ali Salameh had no interest in politics. He was rich, far removed from the people in the teeming Palestinian refugee camps around the Middle East longing for home and revenge.
He went to West Germany to study engineering. But studies were the least of his interests. Far from the eye of Um-Ali, he breathed in the best of what Europe had to offer—elegant restaurants, palatial hotels, glittery nightclubs. He was obsessive about fashion, wearing well-tailored, exclusively black suits. He liked the company of women, and they liked him. His good looks, Eastern charm, and hospitality worked like a honey trap for young German women. The playboy spent hours each day sculpting his body in the weight room and practicing karate, which he recommended to all.
In 1963, he abided by his mother’s wishes and returned to Egypt to marry a simple young woman from the respected Husseini clan. Within a year he had his first son—Hassan, bestowing the title Abu-Hassan. But neither the wedding nor the birth of a child altered the habits of the narcissistic Ali Hassan Salameh. He remained a respected member of Cairo’s party scene, reveling in the city’s posh nightclubs till the early hours of the morning.
In 1976, at the height of his power and influence in Fatah, Salameh agreed to his only press interview. Speaking with Nadia Salti Stephan in Beirut, he spoke of growing up in the shadow of his father.
“The influence of my father has posed a personal problem for me. I grew up in a family that considered ‘struggle’ a matter of heritage which should be carried on by generation after generation . . . . My father was not the only one in the family to give his life for Palestine: some twelve young men in my family, mostly cousins, died in the 1940s. My upbringing was politicized. I lived the Palestinian cause . . . . When my father fell as a martyr, Palestine was passed on to me, so to speak. My mother wanted me to be another Hassan Salameh . . . . This had a tremendous impacton me. I wanted to be myself . . . . Even as a child, I had to follow a certain pattern of behavior . . . . I was made constantly conscious of the fact that I was the son of Hassan Salameh and had to live up to that.”
Abu-Hassan joined the PLO prior to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip—a result of Israel’s crushing victory in the Six Day War in June 1967. As a protégé of Arafat’s, Salameh rose through the ranks with ease. The leader of the PLO saw him as kin, preferred not to notice Salameh’s self-indulgent lifestyle, and appointed him commander of his personal guard, Force 17, apparently so named after the extension number in the PLO’s headquarters in Beirut. Salameh spent as much time as he could with the ra’is. As son of the Palestinian Hassan Salameh, the shahid who had lost his life in battle against the Zionists, Ali wanted to go far.
When Ali Hassan Salameh was sitting for his interview, Israeli intelligence continued to grasp at straws. The civil war that erupted in Lebanon in 1975 worked both for and against the Mossad. On the one hand, deteriorating federal power made getting in and out of Beirut simple. On the other hand, the combatants were exposed to great risk in a lawless city with no rules and no judges, a regular rain of artillery and mortar fire, and the all-too-frequent sound of snipers’ bullets. The risk of catching a stray or well-aimed sniper bullet, or of simply being mistaken for a tourist and mugged at gunpoint, perhaps taken for ransom, was too great. Many assassination plans went unfinished. Even innovative and elegant operations were sidelined out of concern for the combatants’ safety. Most of the plans to kill Ali Hassan Salameh in the chaos of Beirut stopped at Mike Harari’s door.
After Spring of Youth, Salameh had grown cautious about his personal safety, hiring dozens of armed security guards. In the aforementioned interview, Salameh was unsparing in his criticism of the three men slain during that operation. “The enemy’s main victory—the assassination of three of our leaders in Beirut in April 1973—was the result of complete carelessness, which is typical of the Eastern mentality, the fatalistic mentality. My home was about fifty meters from the late Abu-Yussef’s home. The Israeli assassins didn’t come to my home for a very simple reason: it was guarded by my fourteen men.”
There is something profound beneath his sharp sentiments. Unwittingly, Salameh too was taken in by the Mossad myth. That legend told of an Israeli organization so cunning and capable it could strike down any Palestinian in the world in his bedroom. Internalizing the myth, Salameh believed that the Mossad knew precisely where his apartment was in Beirut—fifty meters from Abu-Yussef’s place—but was deterred by his fourteen armed guards, which they supposedly knew about. He never considered that the Israeli intelligence agency simply did not know where he lived, which explains why they never came to kill him that night.
Salameh tried to remain unpredictable in his habits. He kept loaded AK-47s in every room in his apartment. His boss, Yasser Arafat, was even more obsessive about safety, always maintaining an erratic schedule. He hardly ever spent two nights in the same bed. In an attempt to baffle potential assassins—both Israeli and other—he always left sleeping arrangements for the last minute. Although he was mentioned many times as a possible heir to Arafat, Ali Hassan Salameh was too lazy and far too devoted to luxury and pizzazz to abide by the gray edicts of purposefully erratic behavior.
His second marriage, this time in a white suit, only made him less cautious. In Beirut, on June 8, 1977, he married Georgina Rizak, a Christian Lebanese woman who had been crowned Miss Universe 1970. For Salameh, it was love at first sight, which hardly explains why he married the beautiful Rizak without divorcing his first wife, the mother of his two sons, Hassan and Osama. As a Muslim he was allowed more than one wife, he maintained. At any rate, Rizak kept him at home, night after night, in the Snobar section of west Beirut.
Salameh, thought to have been behind the Munich attack, was kept alive for years by virtue of his connection to the CIA. He was Arafat’s liaison with the spy agenc
y, a secret channel enabling communications between the Palestinian leader and the American administration, which refused to publicly acknowledge the PLO. More than once, CIA operatives even offered to put Salameh on their payroll.
Up until the early 1970s the CIA was largely uninterested in the Palestinian side of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That changed after the brutal attack in Munich and, especially, after the execution of the two American diplomats in Khartoum at the hands of Fatah’s Black September. The CIA sought ways to infiltrate Fatah—the largest of the Palestinian groups. The agency wanted someone who could both warn them of imminent attacks against Americans in Europe, the Middle East, and the increasingly perilous city of Beirut, and dissuade Fatah from pursuing such targets. Ali Hassan Salameh was the man for the job. The CIA first made contact with him in 1969, in Beirut. A friend of Salameh’s introduced him to Robert C. Ames, a case officer working out of the American embassy in Lebanon. On at least two occasions CIA operatives offered Salameh a six-figure monthly salary to work as an agent. He refused. The American system—buying with vast sums of money—backfired with Salameh, wounding his pride. Salameh had no desire to be on the payroll; he wanted to change the thinking of the superpower that refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause.
From 1975 to 1976, during the early years of the civil war in Lebanon, the man affectionately know as “the Persuader,” for his capacity to solve problems and assuage enemy minds, provided protection for the American embassy and its staff in Beirut. It was he who, on June 20, 1976, safeguarded the long convoy of embassy staff as they fled to Syria when fighting broke out on the streets of Beirut.
Salameh’s connection with the Americans was on and off for ten years. He probably visited the United States twice: once as a member of Arafat’s entourage, when the ra’is delivered his famous speech from the U.N.’s podium, and again in 1976, when he went undercover to meet high-ranking administration officials in Washington, and from there, with Rizak, at the time his girlfriend, to New Orleans and Hawaii. The trip, apparently on the CIA’s generous tab, was part of their failed recruitment effort.
As far as Salameh was concerned, his connection with the Americans was his ace in the hole, his life insurance policy. The Americans would keep the Israelis at bay. But it was not that simple. The Israelis played with a different hand; his ace in the hole was useless. In May 1977 Prime Minister Menachem Begin came to power and reissued the authorization given by his predecessors to assassinate Ali Hassan Salameh.
In mid-1978 Mossad officials held a standard meeting with their American counterparts at CIA. “Did it ever work with Salameh?” a senior American official was asked, referring to the attempts at recruiting him.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Everything failed . . .”
The Mossad interpreted this as a green light for assassination. Once the Americans had given up their efforts, they figured, he was fair game. The different branches of the American and Israeli intelligence agencies were already then in close contact. SIGINT, signal intelligence of telecommunications, was shared and efforts were made to ensure that HUMINT sources were not approached by both sides. Several times a year Mossad and CIA representatives convened for sessions on terrorism that went far beyond the everyday cooperation and exchange of information. The Americans would understand Israel’s need to eliminate the terrorist.
From an Israeli perspective, Ali Hassan Salameh was one of the planners of Munich, period. 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. One senior officer told me that Salameh continued to plan terror attacks in Israel well after Munich and after the European theater quieted. Salameh, he said, was the man in Arafat’s office who would translate the ideology into action, making the calls from headquarters to operatives in the field.
The Palestinians tell a different story. Both Abu-Daoud and Tawfiq Tirawi, a senior deputy of Abu-Iyad’s and current head of the General Intelligence Apparatus in the West Bank, acknowledge a long litany of attacks orchestrated by Salameh in Europe, but categorically deny his involvement in the Munich attack. When speaking with Tirawi in his Ramallah office, he made clear to me that his intention is not to belittle Salameh’s lifework, but to set the record straight. Salameh, though, was a braggart, unafraid of embellishing the truth. His bravado reached the Tzomet division and they duly reported that his hands were red with the blood of the murdered at Munich. The Israeli media crowned him “The Red Prince.”
Salameh was responsible for four major terror attacks in Europe and one in Asia, according to Palestinian sources. The first, with the aid of Muhammad Boudia, on March 15, 1971, entailed the explosion of a 16,000-ton oil tank in Rotterdam. The second came on December 15, 1971, and involved a lone terrorist who waited in ambush for Ziad Al-Rifa’i, the Jordanian ambassador in London. Rifa’i was lightly wounded in his hand. The third attack was perpetrated in Cologne, Germany. On February 6, 1972, five young Palestinians with Jordanian passports—supposedly Mossad agents—were shot and killed. Half a year later, on August 4, 1972, he planned an attack along with Boudia that resulted in the blowing up of the oil storage tanks in Trieste, burning 200,000 gallons of oil used primarily by Germany. Then too Black September took responsibility for the attack. The fifth attack planned by Salameh was the unsuccessful takeover of the Israeli embassy in Bangkok in late December 1972. There, the terrorists agreed to be flown to Egypt empty-handed. Salameh was furious with the outcome, taking the lack of determination on the terrorists’ part as a personal insult. There were some in Arafat’s inner circle who took care to remind him of the failure in Bangkok now and again.
In conversations I had with senior ex-Caesarea officers they looked at their desire to kill Salameh in terms of closure—we want to “close the circle,” they said. To set the record straight after the disaster in Lillehammer. The passing of time did not cool that desire: it intensified it. From 1972 onward many terrible attacks were carried out by Palestinian terrorists, claiming dozens of innocent lives, and yet no one hurried to draw Xs on the faces of those responsible. Few were added to the Mossad hit list. Salameh, despite a period of silence, never stopped being a top priority. “At that time, were there senior Palestinian activists more deserving of the opportunity to meet their creator than Ali Hassan Salameh?” I asked a senior Mossad officer. The reply: “Undoubtedly, yes.” Despite the steep price invested, in terms of money, technological resources, and manpower, Caesarea’s combatants remained devoted—the chase bordered on obsession.
In the second half of 1978 the noose began to tighten. A careful analysis of the abundant intelligence pouring in isolated a few weak points that could, with proper planning, be made into a Capture Point. Salameh was good about going to visit his mother and sisters. The Mossad recognized that in order to reach the building they shared he had to pass along the north–south route of Verdun Street. That was the Capture Point. In 1978, the Mossad decided to send an undercover Caesarea combatant to Beirut. She, like Sylvia Raphael, worked for the Mossad part-time, only when asked.
Tel Aviv decided that the combatant, who had been trained well for her position in Caesarea, would take up residence in a flat in Beirut that overlooked Verdun Street and collect information about Ali Hassan Salameh. The combatant, exposed many years ago as Erika Chambers, came to Beirut in November 1978, carrying a British passport issued on May 30, 1975, number 25948. She made sure that her neighbors took note of her harmless eccentricities, painting wildly and feeding the neighborhood cats. Her cover: she was a worker at a Palestinian children’s aid organization.
Chambers rented an apartment on the eighth floor of a luxury building on January 10, 1979. From her apartment in the Anis Assaf building she could see narrow Beka Street, into which Salameh turned on his afternoon journeys from his wife’s flat. Chambers rented the place for three months, paying 3,500 Lebanese pounds up front. The Lebanese
investigative report states that two foreign men, one Canadian and one British, entered the country with fake papers and passports. They were Caesarea combatants.
At 1525 hours, on January 22, 1979, Ali Hassan Salameh left his pregnant wife and got into the tan Chevrolet that waited for him with its motor running. Two bodyguards rode with him in the Chevy and two more climbed into the Land Rover following them. Salameh was on the way to his mother’s house for the birthday party of his niece, Nidal’s daughter, who turned three that day. A video camera had been purchased for the occasion.
The convoy slowly turned right onto the narrow Beka Street, where a rented Volkswagen waited on the left-hand side of the road, packed with eleven pounds of hexagene, a plastic explosive equal to seventy pounds of dynamite. One of the combatants stood a hundred yards away and watched the convoy approach. He flipped the switch on the detonator as the Chevrolet rolled past. The explosion rocked the whole block. An eyewitness described seeing a ball of fire and then hearing a deafening explosion. Cars lit up in flames and several bodies were strewn on the street, burned by the flames. One man stumbled out of the car and fell to the ground. People recognized him even in his current state—Abu-Hassan, Ali Hassan Salameh, they said. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Salameh’s funeral was well attended. One memorable scene from that day: Hassan, the thirteen-year-old son of the shahid, sitting in Arafat’s lap, an AK-47 in hand, a kaffiyeh similar to the one Arafat wore across his shoulders, and a military beret on his head. It seemed clear that he represented the third generation of armed struggle.
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response Page 19
