Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (29 page)

It was not for these exploits that operations Wrath of God and Springtime of Youth would be remembered in most histories of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Mossad’s apologists including Zvi Zamir assert that prior to Munich, “there was no need for illegal Israeli activitiy in Europe.”
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Munich traumatized Israel as 9/11 traumatized America and internationalized the conflict. In Israeli eyes, such actions were henceforth illegal but unavoidable. Much international opinion was prepared, tacitly, to tolerate this position so long as Israeli reprisals generated no innocent victims. As an English wit, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, once said: “I don’t mind what people do so long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.” At Lillehammer, Norway, on 21 July 1973, the horses and much else were scandalized when a Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki was misidentified by a Mossad informant as Ali Hussein Salameh, the rich, flamboyant operations chief for Black September, known as the Red Prince.

Lillehammer is a crisp, neat, and very provincial resort favored by cross-country skiers. During the Cold War, British SAS men, training for Arctic warfare, were posted there dressed as civilians to learn from Norwegians, whose idea of a Sunday morning family outing was a brisk twenty-five-mile journey over rolling countryside while towing the youngest in a plastic ski buggy. It is a place where strangers are noticed and where, in the seventies, the presence of foreigners—to say nothing of a hidden arsenal of unguarded weapons for local stay-behind forces in the event of a Soviet invasion—lent the place a certain edge.

Bouchiki was gunned down by two members of the assassination team as he returned home from the cinema with his pregnant wife. Though some members of the Mossad squad escaped, six, including two women, were arrested. Five were convicted of murder. Huge damage was caused to Mossad’s legend as the long, invincible arm of Israeli justice. The real target, the Red Prince, was not the sort of personality to hide himself away in obscure Lillehammer. He was blown up in a car bomb in Beirut, with eight other people, almost six years after Bouchiki’s assassination on 22 January 1979.

Between 1976 and 1988, the Army’s Sayeret Matkal Commando did much to restore the reputation of Israel’s Special Forces, in a series of daring rescues and high-risk retributive operations far from home. On 22 June 1976, an Air France airliner took off from Tel Aviv bound for Paris, pausing at Athens, where it was seized by two members of the Baader-Meinhof group (whose leaders were still in prison in Germany) and two terrorists belonging to Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which shared Baader-Meinhof’s belief in Marxism. The crew of twelve and 246 passengers were now hostages. A friendly welcome awaited the terrorists at Entebbe airfield, Uganda, whose ruler, Idi Amin, a convert to Islam, was reputed to store the heads of former political opponents in his refrigerator. The hijacked aircraft was met at Entebbe by another seven terrorists. Non-Jewish passengers were promptly released, providing Israeli intelligence with useful information about the architecture of the airfield and the chances of rescue. The 108 hostages who remained were Jews.

If any rescue was to have a chance of success, 3,000 miles from Israel with no red-carpet access to the target, deception was the key. The man who devised the deception plan, and much else, was Major-General Dan Shomron. His bleak assessment, he later explained, was: “You had more than 100 people sitting in a small room, surrounded by terrorists with their fingers on the trigger. They could fire in a fraction of a second. We had to fly seven hours, land safely, drive to the terminal area where the hostages were being held, get inside, and eliminate all the terrorists before any of them could fire.”
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When he revealed his plan to the Chiefs of Staff, “all those around me weren’t enthusiastic. They said that the program was brilliant but the risk was too great. James Bond, they said.” When he briefed the team who would do the business, he said: “We’re going out 4,000 kilometers. We’re alone, but we’re the strongest force in the field. If anyone is afraid, he may leave.” No one moved.

The deception—the Trojan Horse for Operation Thunderbolt—was a black, shiny Mercedes limousine, Idi Amin’s preferred form of transport, flying a Ugandan flag but still carrying Israeli number plates. If the pseudo-VIP convoy, Mercedes and outriders, led the assault, it might, with luck, bluff its way through the outer cordon of Ugandan guards without firing a shot. The convoy was led by Sayeret Matkal’s commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan (“Yoni”) Netanyahu, elder brother of the man who would become their country’s prime minister in 1996 and later. The planners were blessed with good intelligence. Intricate details of the now-derelict old terminal where the hostages were held were supplied by the Israeli company that had constructed the building, enabling a crude mock-up to be built in Israel on which the commandos could practice. Meanwhile, a Mossad pilot made a simulated forced landing on the airfield in a light aircraft before the operation began, and, by unspecified means, contrived to relay photographs of the target to Shomron.

Six aircraft—two Boeing 707s and four lumbering Hercules transports—made up the force. One of the Boeings circled above Entebbe, providing secure communications to Tel Aviv and for the men on the ground. The second, converted into a field hospital, was parked at neutral Nairobi. The fourth Hercules was empty, allocated to the hostages if any could be brought out. Other space was meticulously provided for casualties, dead or alive. A team of pathfinders was the first to land, planting beacons to mark the runway in the event that when the action started, the main runway lights would be extinguished. That happened.

Then, as the Hercules fleet approached Entebbe, the leading aircraft slotted in behind a scheduled British cargo flight, as planned, and touched down in its wake. The other three flew in a holding pattern as the lead Hercules dropped its ramp on final approach. The Mercedes and its escorts—two Land Rovers—rolled onto the tarmac before the aircraft halted in front of the terminal where the hostages were held.

Two Ugandan sentries challenged the convoy and were immediately picked off by the Sayeret with silenced pistols. Around forty meters from the building, Netanyahu’s deputy, known as “Muki,” jumped from the Mercedes with his team and in quick succession killed a Ugandan guard and two of the terrorists, now on their feet and firing at the intruders. Outside the building, Netanyahu was hit in the back by a sniper bullet fired from a disused control tower and fatally wounded. In other contacts, six terrorists—two armed with grenades—and two more Ugandan guards were killed. As the team broke into the terminal, one of the guards fired a burst of automatic fire. He was unused to the weapon’s tendency to aim high unless it was gripped firmly. His bullets shattered glass windows above the hostages before he, too, was cut down by the attackers.

As one of the rescuers, using a loud-hailer, ordered the terrified hostages to keep their heads down, the other three Hercules landed. The rescue had taken just three minutes. Early the following morning, “the lead Hercules flew low over Eilat at the southern tip of Israel. The tired airmen in the cockpit were astonished to see people in the streets below waving and clapping.”
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If terrorists had hoped to achieve a propaganda-by-deed, a “spectacular,” this latest exercise in hostage-taking was an own-goal. “Entebbe,” for years afterward, was no longer a place in Africa but a fanfare that celebrated the professionalism of Israel’s Special Forces worldwide.

Over the next two years, Sayeret Matkal pulled off at least three other rescues, one known as the bus hostage rescue, before going onto the offensive with an assassination operation in conjunction with Mossad and its military arm, Metsada. The target was Khalil al-Wazir (nom de guerre, Abu Jihad), Arafat’s deputy in the PLO. He had settled in Sidi Bou Said, a placid suburb of Tunis, when, on 16 April 1988, Israeli commandos—replicating the Beirut attack on Black September leaders in Operation Spring of Youth thirteen years before—smashed their way into his home and gunned him down in the presence of his family. Yet again, Mossad agents speaking fluent Arabic prepared the ground. The assassination team again came ashore in dinghies. A Boeing 707 circled overhead as a communications center and command post.

Equally dramatic were Israel’s snatch operations, exercises in hostage-taking or the unlawful arrest of individuals outside Israeli jurisdiction. The abduction of the Holocaust bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann by Shin Bet operatives in May 1960 led to his trial and execution in Israel and an international outcry about Argentina’s territorial integrity. Eichmann’s trial generated a memorable phrase to describe his dutiful, no-questions-asked attention to detail in compiling his balance sheet of death: “The banality of evil.” It also left a bad taste in the mouths of some Israelis, thanks to claims made by the legendary Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal that he had traced Eichmann to Argentina before anyone else. Isser Harel, a Mossad founding father controlling the search, challenged Wiesenthal’s claim. In 2009, the writer Guy Walters went further. Wiesenthal’s reputation, he wrote, “was built on sand. He was a liar—and a bad one at that. From the end of the Second World War to the end of his life in 2005, he would lie repeatedly about his supposed hunt for Eichmann….”
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The history was further darkened by the suspicion that the CIA did not try too hard, if at all, to pursue Eichmann at a time when hundreds of unreformed Nazi war criminals were working for the agency against Communism in Europe.
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In spite of some failures along the way, Mossad/Special Forces abductions continued. In Operation Crate 3, carried out by the Sayeret Matkal on 21 June, 1972, five Syrian intelligence officers with Palestinian resistance men, on a guided tour near the Israeli border, were seized as hostages. They then became bargaining chips to secure the release of three Israeli airmen held captive in Syria. The world’s media paid little attention to this one, perhaps because it was a “domestic” affair within the opaque Middle East, where even participants did not always comprehend what was happening. The kidnap of Mordecai Vanunu in Rome in September 1986 made bigger waves. Vanunu, according to taste, is either a traitor to Israel, having betrayed its most cherished military secret, or an heroic whistleblower meriting a Nobel Peace Prize.

Vanunu, a rabbi’s son, worked from 1976 until 1985 as a technician at his country’s top-secret nuclear plant in the Negev desert at Dimona. During those years, disenchanted with Israel’s manufacture of plutonium sufficient for up to 200 nuclear weapons, he made his way around the underground plant, taking photographs and making notes, apparently unnoticed by security staff. Soon after being laid off with 180 others in 1985, he was in Australia, undergoing a process of conversion to Christianity. He encountered a British journalist and after prolonged debriefing by the
Sunday Times
Insight team in London, he provided the newspaper with a densely detailed description of the Dimona plant.

Mossad learned of this disaster before the
Sunday Times
published
The Secrets of Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal
on 5 October 1986, though just how that happened is unclear. It might have something to do with the fact that much of the British media is under constant surveillance by security agencies including MI5, the D-Notice Committee, and the Ministry of Defence. In addition, in a gossipy profession, a minority of journalists collaborate with the intelligence services. Leaks happen regularly, sometimes as “spoiler” stories that appear ahead of scheduled publication as a means of limiting damage to an intelligence agency, or as an abuse of legal process to stifle dissent. (The author has extensive experience of the phenomenon.)

The
Sunday Times
reprinted Vanunu’s disclosures on 21 September 2008 with the additional note: “Before publication Vanunu, now 63, was lured into flying to Italy by a Mossad agent named Cheryl Bentov. He was captured by Israeli agents, smuggled to Israel and put on trial on charges of treason and espionage. He was released in 2004….”
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While some humanitarian organizations regarded the eighteen-year sentence imposed by a closed tribunal on Vanunu, ten of those years in solitary, as harsh, Mossad believed he had gotten off lightly. The director of Mossad at the time of Vanunu’s abduction, Shabtai Shavit, told an Australian broadcaster that assassination was an option that he had considered. “I would be lying if I said that thought didn’t pass through our heads,” said Shavit. It did not happen “because Jews don’t do that to other Jews.”
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Shavit would also have been aware of the ground rules for a Mossad assassination. At any one time, according to the former Mossad case officer Ostrovsky, there might be 100 names on an execution list. Some cases are more urgent than others. An operational emergency might require shortcuts in obtaining clearance for the execution. Otherwise, permission is sought by Mossad’s director from the prime minister, who would send it to a secret judicial committee. This sits as a military court. The accused, unaware of the hearing, is represented by counsel, as is the state. A guilty verdict means that the accused might be brought to Israel for trial (as were Eichmann and Vanunu) “or if that is too dangerous or simply impossible, execute him at the first possible opportunity,” but only after the prime minister has signed the execution order. “One of the first duties of any new Israeli prime minister is to read the execution list and decide whether or not to initial each name on it.”
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For Israel, the abduction/assassination option had a respectable history, if only because elements of the British 8th Army’s Jewish Brigade made common cause with a handful of Holocaust survivors in hunting down Nazis in postwar Europe. These retributive squads, known as Nokmin, or Avengers, summarily executed many hundreds of former Gestapo and SS officers in Italy, Austria, and Germany, probably assisted by former colleagues of the targeted men. The British SAS had its own, unofficial War Crimes Investigation Team known as the Secret Hunters, operating in France and Germany immediately after the war. It claimed to steer clear of extra-judicial killings, preferring to hand over Nazi fugitives, particularly those involved in the murder of SAS prisoners-of-war in France, to due judicial process. The complete truth of that might never be known. Meanwhile, as we have noted, former Nazis recruited by the Gladio organization and other shadowy outfits enjoyed Allied protection in their joint prosecution of the emerging war on Communism.