This had “physically sickened her”, Meir said, and reinforced her conviction that Europeans cared neither about the deaths of Israelis at the Olympics nor about fighting terrorism nor about Jews.
“The fact [is] that terrorism has its headquarters in Europe. … You’ll be sorry. Thanks to your inertia and your indulgence, terror will be multiplied and you’ll pay the price of it too,” Meir told Fallaci.
As a consequence, Meir and her government decided on drastic measures, including a highly visible campaign of assassinations. One aim was to eliminate actors who might otherwise go on to harm Israelis. But its broader objective was to intimidate, disrupt and deter the country’s enemies.
The parallels of this episode with the present-day are remarkable, though I had no idea that this would be the case when I started researching my new book, The Revolutionists, a decade ago.
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Israel is once again committed to an assassination campaign targeting those responsible for appalling acts of violence against its citizens, though one of much greater lethality, and is again prepared to pay a diplomatic cost to pursue it – up to a point. This effort too has had significant successes – and some obvious failures that have prompted a major international backlash.
Then as now, many predicted that Israel would react forcefully. Documents I obtained during research for The Revolutionists revealed that the CIA had predicted that the Israelis would launch a counter-terror campaign in the aftermath of the Munich attack. British diplomats in Tel Aviv thought something similar, suggesting to London that Meir would seek to “terrorise the terrorists”, with teams of “faceless men” whose existence could be officially denied, “turning the terrorists’ [own] techniques and methods against them”.
The first target of the Israeli campaign was Wael Zwaiter, a poet, writer and part-time translator working at the Libyan Embassy in Rome who the Mossad believed was connected to the Munich operations, or at least to other violence.
In mid-December 1972, operatives broke into the Paris apartment of Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO’s representative there, and inserted plastic explosives into the base of his telephone. Hamshari died in hospital.
Next it was the turn of a law professor at the American University of Beirut called Basil al-Kubaisi. Approached on a street corner in Paris by two men as he returned to his modest pension on the rue de l’Arcade, al-Kubaisi, who was linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had time to say “No, No” before shots rang out.
The campaign climaxed with Operation Springtime of Youth, a bid to attack the Palestine Liberation Organisation in Beirut itself. This was now deemed feasible, if risky. Yasser Arafat, its chairman, was too well protected, but others were not. This bold operation too was a success, with a team of special forces, led by Ehud Barak, the future prime minister, killing three senior PLO officials.
There was little hard evidence that any of the targets chosen were involved in specific attacks but this did not particularly matter. It would be how and where the Israelis struck, not whom, that would be most important.
David Elazar, the chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces, summed up the aim of the entire campaign of violence since the Munich attacks when he told reporters that “if the terrorists can come to . . . Cyprus, to Paris and to Rome, there is no reason to believe that we are not able to come to any place in the world".
One target had so far evaded the Mossad: a senior PLO security official close to Arafat called Ali Hassan Salameh, whom the service believed was responsible for the Munich attacks. This was not the case, as I established from West German records and other declassified documents during my research, though he had been involved in other terrorist violence. Salameh, a flamboyant character with a taste for Elvis, fast cars and beautiful women, was a constant provocation and irritant. Competent and articulate, he was also the PLO’s main channel of communication with the CIA, possibly providing another motive for his elimination.
But the bid to kill Salameh went badly wrong. When he was apparently traced to an out-of-season Norwegian ski resort in July 1973, a Mossad team was hastily put together and dispatched. The location was less unlikely than it might seem. Former spies and militants explained to me that Scandinavia was a useful base for Palestinian armed factions and activists at the time.
But the Mossad team only had one picture of their target – a photograph supplied by the British domestic service MI5 in the immediate aftermath of the Munich attacks – and lost the trail of their target. When they finally picked him up again, several members of the team were unsure they had the right man, pointing out that their famously sybaritic and stylish target was not only unfashionably dressed and rode a bicycle but appeared to have suddenly grown a beard and taken up residence in a modest apartment block with a heavily pregnant local woman. “If that’s Salameh, then I’m Mother Teresa,” one said. Their concerns were ignored by the senior men leading the mission.
At around 10.40pm on July 21, a grey Volvo stopped next to the identified target who was walking with the pregnant woman, his wife on the outskirts of Lillehammer. It was still perfectly light at such a northern latitude. Two people got out carrying silenced Beretta pistols and fired thirteen times, killing the man almost instantly.
The murder was as clinical as any carried out by the Mossad over the previous ten months. But they had not killed Salameh but an Algerian-born waiter called Ahmed Bouchiki who had no connection to any form of political activism, let alone violence. The mistake was grave but could have been covered up had the Mossad team not made a series of further errors which led to the arrest of half of them by local authorities. All were put on trial in a public court, convicted and sentenced to several years in jail.
The fiasco prompted outrage around the world, and the trial revealed much highly sensitive information. Strict compartmentalisation limited the damage done to the Mossad’s operations, one former operatives told me, and senior officials of intelligence services continued to share details of potential future targets with the Israelis. Yet the public outrage was loud and real. Golda Meir decided that the diplomatic cost of further killings was too high, and ordered an end to the assassination campaign on the continent.
In the Steven Spielberg film about the Israeli campaign of assassinations, the Mossad teams are wracked by moral doubts. Those I interviewed said this was very far from the truth. One told me: “Anyone we killed deserved to die, and every killing served a purpose”.
In my book I show how other more intractable and dangerous enemies soon took the place of those who have been killed. In 1979, Ali Hassan Salameh was killed by the Mossad in Beirut. Three or four years later, Israel and the US were facing bearded young men who drove massive trucks into embassies, barracks and Israeli intelligence headquarters. This was far beyond anything the PLO had ever tried. These operations were conducted by Islamist extremists from networks that would become Hezbollah. The attacks were so outlandish that Israeli investigators simply could not comprehend them, veterans of the period told me. A few years later, Hamas was founded.
‘The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s’ by Jason Burke is published by Bodley Head (£30)
