Operation Wrath of God review: ‘A reminder of the sad need for Mossad – then and now’

It was only when the ninth assassination went horribly wrong, with the 1973 murder of an innocent Moroccan waiter in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer whom Mossad mistook for the terrorist mastermind Ali Hassan Salameh, that the operation was mothballed amid widespread condemnation. It took some time for Mossad to regain its reputation for ruthless daring and efficiency (although it eventually caught up with and killed Salameh in 1979).

Aviva Guttmann, a Swiss academic at Aberystwyth University, has written an interesting account of Operation Wrath of God through the prism of the Club de Berne’s links with Israel to show how essential the European intelligence agencies were to Mossad’s deadly strategy.

Her book is based on unique access to a huge cache of Club de Berne original documents she turned up in the Swiss archives and which provide a fascinating insight into intelligence activity in Europe and elsewhere in the year following Munich.

It is salutary to be reminded how lax security was in those days: terrorists were able to carry guns and even heavier weaponry through airports, plane hijackings were frequent, and the absence of adequate anti-terror legislation throughout Europe meant that suspects were often freed and deported without trial.

And in what was effectively still a pre-computer age it often took weeks for information to be laboriously checked out across the Berne network.

Nevertheless, the painstaking co-operative inter-agency detective work that Guttmann details helped Europe to build up a formidable bank of knowledge about Arab terrorist methods and strategies.

Italy was regarded by the Palestinians as a particularly easy country in which to operate but this very reputation may have forced the Italians to improve their security to the extent that they prevented several terrorist attacks in the early 1970s, including a planned ground-to-air missile attack on an El Al plane leaving Rome airport, which has been documented before but about which Guttmann supplies new information.

Although clearly no fan of Mossad, Guttmann still poses some valid questions: were the European agencies fully aware of Israel’s assassination operation or were they quietly complicit in it?

Did Mossad’s access to Kilowatt keep it informed about how much the Europeans actually knew about the Israelis’ activities?

And do intelligence agencies ignore their countries’ own foreign policies while pursuing their own ends? A good example was France, which in the 1970s was becoming increasingly critical of Israel (plus ça change) while its RG and DST agencies were quietly co-operating with Mossad to help to prevent several terrorist outrages. And when Mossad dispatched Mohamed Boudia, a Black September leader, with a car bomb in Paris in June 1973, the DST was happy to go along with the initial theory that he accidentally blew himself up with explosives he was carrying in his car. They weren’t too fussed about the precise details.

The sad reality is that while Guttmann is describing events that happened more than half a century ago, the Israel-Palestine conflict rages on and Arab terrorists continue their deadly work in Europe. But remembering the climate of 1972-3 might help us tolerate the increased security we now experience everywhere.

Operation Wrath of God

By Aviva Guttmann

Cambridge University Press