Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 14 THE CHAMBERMAID’S BOMB

On a cloudless morning in February 1986, two Israeli air force fighter aircraft swooped down on a Libyan-registered Learjet flying from Tripoli to Damascus. The civilian plane was in international airspace, thirty thousand feet over the Mediterranean and about to begin its descent into Syrian airspace. On board were delegates returning from a conference of Palestinian and other radical groups that Mu’ammar Gadhafi had convened to discuss new steps to achieve the Libyan leader’s burning obsession to see Israel driven from the face of the earth.

The sight of the fighters taking up stations on either side of the Learjet created near panic among its fourteen passengers, and for good reason. Four months before, on Tuesday, October 1, 1985, Israeli F-15 fighter-bombers had destroyed the headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization southeast of Tunis, flying a round-trip of almost three thousand miles, which had involved air-to-air refueling and the kind of precise intelligence that always sent a collective shiver throughout the Arab world.

That raid was a direct response to the murder by PLO gunmen of three middle-aged Israeli tourists as they sat aboard their yacht in the Cypriot port of Larnaca only days before, basking in the sunshine of late summer. The killings had occurred on Yom Kippur and, for many Israelis, the slaughter rekindled memories of the onset of the war on the Day of Atonement when the nation itself had been caught as unaware as the tourists.

Despite having endured almost four decades of terrorism, the murders caused widespread horror and fear among Israelis: the tourists had been held for some time on board their boat and allowed to write down their final thoughts before they were killed: first to die was the woman, fatally shot in the stomach. Her two male companions were made to throw her overboard. Then one after another, they were shot at point-blank range in the back of the head.

In the black propaganda war that had long been a feature of the intelligence war between the PLO and Israel, the former claimed that the three victims were Mossad agents on a mission. So well did the PLO plant the story that several European newspapers identified the woman as one of the agents caught in the Lillehammer affair in 1973. That woman was still alive and had long given up her Mossad activities.

Since then the Arab press had been full of dire warnings that Israel would retaliate. Many of the stories had been planted by Mossad’s psychological warfare department to fray still further the nerves of millions of Arabs.

The passengers in the Learjet, who only a few hours before had chanted for the destruction of Israel at the Libyan conference, saw the grim faces of their enemy peering at them. One of the fighters waggled its wings, the follow-me signal recognized the world over by pilots. To reinforce the message, an Israeli pointed a gloved hand straight ahead and then downward toward Galilee. The women on board the jet began to wail; some of the men started to pray. Others stared ahead fatalistically. They all knew this had always been a possibility; the accursed infidels had the capability to reach out and snatch them from the sky.

One of the Israeli aircraft fired a short warning burst from its cannon, warning the Learjet’s captain not to contemplate radioing for help from the Syrian air force — only minutes’ flying time away. The passengers’ fear increased. Were they, too, about to suffer the same fate that had befallen one of the authentic heroes of the Arab world?

Just a month before the Tunis air raid, an Israeli naval patrol boat with Mossad agents on board had stopped a small ship called Opportunity on its regular shuttle between Beirut and Larnaca. From the bilges they had dragged out Faisal Abu Sharah, a terrorist with blood on his hands. He had been bundled on board the patrol boat, the prelude to ruthless interrogation in Israel, followed by a quick trial and a long term in jail. The swiftness and audacity of the operation had yet again enhanced the image of invincibility Israel presented to the Arab world.

Such incidents were not uncommon. Working closely with Israel’s small but highly trained navy, Mossad had since then intercepted several boats and removed passengers suspected of terrorist activities. Not only Israel’s long Mediterranean coast called for vigilance; the Red Sea also presented a constant vulnerability. A Mossad agent in Yemen had been the source for an operation that had thwarted a PLO plot to sail a fishing boat up the Red Sea to the Israeli resort of Elat and detonate its cargo of explosives close to the shore, lined with hotels. An Israeli gunboat had intercepted the fishing boat and overpowered its two suicide bombers before they could detonate the cargo.

As the Learjet descended toward northern Israel, the passengers also feared this was a further retaliation for what had happened when another of their heroes, Abu Al-Abbas, had, only a few months before, on October 2, 1985, taken over the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in what was the most spectacular act of maritime piracy the world could recall. Al-Abbas had murdered one of the passengers, Leon Klinghoffer, an American Jew in a wheelchair, by throwing him into the sea.

The crime had become a floating diplomatic incident that had embroiled an outraged Israel and the United States, Egypt, Italy, Syria, Cyprus, Tunisia, and the stateless PLO; for days the crisis had drifted around the Mediterranean, gathering publicity for the hijackers and revealing the self-interest which, in the Middle East, governed attitudes toward terrorism. The hijacking of a cruise liner that was bringing much-needed foreign tourists and hard currency to Israel, followed by the murder of a passenger, provoked a wave of indecision. The murder had technically taken place on Italian soil, the Genova-registered Achille Lauro. But Italy was highly vulnerable to terrorism and wished to see a quiet end to the incident. The United States wanted justice for its murdered citizen. Across the nation appeared stickers proclaiming, “Don’t get mad, get even.” Finally the hijackers, having held the world’s headlines for several days, surrendered to the Egyptian authorities, who then allowed them to leave the country — to the fury of Israel.

More than one of the Learjet’s passengers wondered whether they would now be held in some Israeli jail in an act of revenge. With the fighters still flying almost wingtip to wingtip, the executive jet landed at a military airfield in northern Galilee. A waiting team of Aman interrogators had been told by Mossad that on board were two of the most wanted terrorists in the world, the notorious Abu Nidal and the equally infamous Ahmed Jibril. Instead the interrogators found themselves questioning a bunch of badly frightened Arabs, none of whose names appeared on Israel’s computers. The Learjet was allowed to depart with its passengers.

Israel would insist that the prospect of catching terrorists was the only reason for intercepting the aircraft. But within Mossad was a mood that no opportunity should be lost to create fear and panic in Arab minds. The Aman interrogators had some satisfaction in knowing that the passengers would further the image of an all-powerful Israel.

The head of Aman, Ehud Barak, believed the operation was yet another example of Mossad shooting from the hip, and he made his feeling very clear to Nahum Admoni.

Never a person to suffer a mistake or a rebuke lightly, the Mossad chief set about devising an operation that would not only put an end to the mocking of Mossad on Arab radio stations for being reduced to forcing down an unarmed civilian plane, but one that would also end the sniping within Israel’s own intelligence community that the service he commanded should next time be very sure before it made a fool of them all.

So began an operation which, among much else, would ruin the life of a pregnant Irish chambermaid and send her Arab lover to prison to serve one of the longest sentences given by a British court; cause huge embarrassment to German chancellor Helmut Kohl and French prime minister Jacques Chirac; once more reveal Robert Maxwell in full manipulative fury; cause Syria to be exiled from the world’s diplomatic table; and force all those Arab radio stations that had so gleefully ridiculed Mossad to change their tune.

Like all operations, there were moments of high tensions and periods of patient waiting. It had its quota of human despair, useful anger, and betrayal, but for men like Nahum Admoni, such a plot was the very substance of his life. It went with asking himself the same questions over and over again. Could it work? Would other people actually believe that it had been like that? And, of course, would the real truth remain buried forever?

More certain, Mossad had enlisted the very different skills of two men for the operation. One was a katsa who had served in Britain under the alias of Tov Levy. The other was a Palestinian informer, code-named Abu. The Palestinian had been recruited after being discovered by Mossad stealing from a PLO fund he had been administering in a village on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Playing on his fear that the crime could be revealed through an anonymous tip to the village head, resulting in Abu’s death, Mossad had dragooned him to leave for London. He had been provided with fake documents stating he was a businessman and given living expenses commensurate with his role as a high-flying big spender. His assigned controller was Tov Levy.

In every way Abu fit the classic definition by Uzi Mahnaimi, a former member of the Israeli intelligence community, of what an agent should be: “You spend hours with him, days even; you teach him everything he needs to know, you go through his courses with him, help him, socialize with him, look at his family photographs, you know the names and ages of his children. But the agent is not a human being; you must never think of him as one. The agent is just a weapon, a means to an end, like a Kalashnikov — that is all. If you have to send him to the hanging tree, don’t even think about it. The agent is always a cipher, never a person.”

Abu had played his part to perfection and had become a familiar figure around the gambling tables of Mayfair. Given his success, his sexual appetites and bouts of drinking were tolerated. Moving in the haunts of arms dealers and wealthy PLO supporters, Abu picked up information that enabled Mossad to strike against its enemies. Fifteen PLO men were killed by Mossad over a few weeks as a result of Abu’s information.

Some of his meetings with Tov Levy had taken place in the bars and restaurants of the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. Working there was an Irish woman from Dublin, Ann-Marie Murphy.

Like many others, she had been tempted across the Irish Sea by the lure of making good money in London. All she had been able to get was a chambermaid’s job. The pay was low, the hours long. Ann-Marie’s little free time was spent in bars in the Shepherds Bush district, long a refuge for Irish expatriates. She joined in the rebel songs and made a glass of Guinness last. Then it was back to her lonely room, ready for another long day of changing bedsheets, scouring lavatory bowls, and leaving each hotel room sparkling in the prescribed Hilton manner. Her career was going nowhere.

Shortly before Christmas, 1985, close to tears at the thought of having to spend it alone in a city so different from the carefree Dublin she longed for, Ann-Marie met a dark-skinned Arab who was handsome in her eyes. In his silk suit and flashy tie he also exuded affluence. When he smiled at her, she smiled back. His name was Nezar Hindawi, and he was a distant cousin of Abu. Hindawi was thirty-five years old, though he lied about that to Ann-Marie, lopping three years from his age to make him the same as her, thirty-two. He would go on lying to a trusting, naive woman.

They had met in a bar close to the BBC Theatre in Shepherds Bush Green. She had never been to this pub before and was surprised to find Hindawi among the ruddy-faced building-site navvies whose accents echoed every county in Ireland. But Hindawi seemed to know many of the drinkers, joining in their rough humor and standing a round when it was his turn.

For weeks, Hindawi had been coming to the bar hoping to make contact with the IRA. Abu had asked him to do so, though typically his cousin had not explained why. Hindawi’s few attempts to discuss the political situation in Ireland had been brushed aside by men more interested in sinking pints. Whatever scheme Abu was concocting would remain a secret as far as Hindawi was concerned. The arrival of Ann-Marie had also given him something else to think about.

Captivated by his good manners and charm, Ann-Marie soon found herself laughing at Hindawi’s stories about his life in the Middle East. To a woman who had never traveled farther than London, he made it sound like an Arabian Nights fantasy. Hindawi drove her home that night, kissed her on both cheeks, and left. Ann-Marie wondered if the giddy feeling she experienced was the first stage of falling in love. The following day he took her to lunch at a Syrian restaurant and introduced her to the delights of Arabic cooking. Tipsy from a fine Lebanese wine, she put up only token resistance when he took her back to his apartment. That afternoon they made love. Until then Ann-Marie had been a virgin. Raised in the strong Irish Catholic tradition opposed to contraception, she had taken no precautions.

In February 1986, she found she was pregnant. She told Hindawi. He smiled reassurance; he would take care of everything. Alarmed, Ann-Marie said she would never agree to an abortion. He told her the idea had never crossed his mind. In truth he was panic-stricken at the prospect of having to marry a woman he regarded as beneath his social class. He also feared she would go to the authorities and complain. With little understanding of how indifferently officialdom would view such matters, he thought his permission to stay in Britain would be revoked, resulting in his being deported as an undesirable alien. Hindawi turned to the only source of help he knew, his cousin Abu.

Abu had his own problems, having lost a good deal of money gambling. He bluntly told Hindawi he couldn’t loan him the money Hindawi had decided he would offer Ann-Marie to return to Dublin, have the baby, and place it out for adoption. She had told him that was common in Ireland.

Next day Abu met Tov Levy. Over dinner the katsa told Abu he needed to do something to cause the British government to close down the Syrian embassy in London and order out its staff, long suspected of being involved in terrorist activities. Levy said he needed a “hook” that would achieve that. Could Abu tell him about anyone, anything, that might be useful? Abu mentioned he had a cousin with an Irish girlfriend who was pregnant in London.

The plot began to coalesce after the aftershocks rocking the Israeli intelligence community from the disclosures tumbling out of Washington about the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. Israel’s tough image for dealing with terrorism had taken a pounding. There was anger within Mossad that the Reagan administration had allowed matters to go so badly wrong as to allow Israel’s role in Irangate to surface.

The revelations had made it that much more difficult to maintain even the minimum support of cautiously friendly neighbors like Egypt and Jordan at a time when they were both finally growing tired of the PLO and the histrionics of Yasser Arafat. Increasingly the PLO leader had become a political captive of his own extremists. No Marxist himself, he found himself cornered into spouting its rhetoric, calling for “the liquidation of the Zionist entity politically, culturally, and militarily.”

The vituperation did nothing to improve his position among the various breakaway factions of the PLO. To them, Arafat was the man who had been forced to make a humiliating withdrawal from Beirut under cover of UN protection from the watchful eye of the Israelis. Some fifteen thousand Palestinian fighters had boarded boats for Tunis. Others had deserted Arafat on the promise of support from Syria and had become even more militant against both him and Israel from their new bases outside Damascus.

Yet for Mossad, Arafat remained the key obstacle to peace. Killing him was still a priority; at the Mossad target range the silhouettes were all of Arafat. Until he was dead, he would continue to be held ultimately responsible for all the acts of savagery committed by the disparate Palestinian groups in Syria.

Then two incidents happened which, momentarily at least, moved the focus from Arafat, and ultimately settled the plot in which Abu was to become a key figure.

A growing problem Syria had with the PLO factions under its wing was the need to satisfy their constant demands for action. As one of the world’s prime exponents of state-sponsored terrorism, Syria was more than prepared to finance any operation that did not further blight its own already seriously tarnished image. Many of the schemes the PLO factions placed before Syrian intelligence were too risky for the Syrians to endorse. One had been to poison Israel’s water supply. Another was to send an Arab suicide bomber, posing as an Orthodox Jew, to blow himself up at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Either was guaranteed to draw draconian retaliation from Israel.

Then came an audacious plot that Syrian intelligence recognized could not only work, but would strike a telling blow at the very heart of Israel’s military supremacy. The first step had been to buy a ship. After several weeks of searching ports around the Mediterranean, a Panama-registered merchantman, Atavarius, was purchased and sailed to the port of Algiers.

A week after it arrived, a detachment of Palestinian commandos arrived from Damascus on a Syrian air force transport plane. With them they brought a small arsenal of weapons: machine guns, antitank weapons, and boxes of Kalashnikov rifles so beloved of terrorists. That night, under cover of darkness, the commandos and arms were placed on board the Atavarius.

At daybreak the ship set sail, its captain having told the port authorities he was bound for Greece to undergo an engine overhaul. The commandos were belowdecks. But their arrival had not gone unnoticed. A Mossad informer employed in the harbormaster’s office had become sufficiently suspicious to inform the katsa stationed in the city. He sent a message to Tel Aviv.

Its arrival triggered a “condition yellow” alert that was sent to the entire Mossad network stationed around the Mediterranean. Memories were still fresh of the unsuccessful attempt to blow up the seafront at Elat, and it was assumed this could be a similar attack, only this time against Haifa. The busy port on the Mediterranean seaboard was an obvious target. Two naval gunboats were stationed offshore ready to deal with any attempt by the Atavarius to enter the harbor that was Israel’s main trading sea link with the world.

The Atavarius’s destination was the beaches north of Tel Aviv. In a plan that could have been plucked from a Hollywood movie, the Atavarius would lower the commandos into rubber boats, which they would row ashore. Then they would fight their way into Tel Aviv to their target, the Kirya, the fortresslike headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces, whose tower dominated the skyline and would serve as a beacon for the commandos. The plan depended on total surprise and the ruthless courage the Israelis had themselves made a byword.

The attack had been set for Israel’s Independence Day celebrations, when a carnival mood would prevail, and the Kirya, according to Syrian intelligence, would have fewer men than usual guarding it. The commandos did not expect to escape with their lives, but they had been chosen for the mission because they had all shown the same mentality as the Beirut suicide bombers.

Meantime, they could relax and enjoy the short cruise that took them past Tunisia to their next landfall, the island of Sicily. No one on board probably paid any attention to the fishing trawler wallowing in the swell as the Atavarius passed. The boat contained sophisticated electronic equipment capable of monitoring radio conversations on board the merchantman. A short transmission in Arabic announced that the ship was on schedule. One of the trawler’s two-man crew, both Mossad sayanim, radioed the news to Tel Aviv. For the next twenty-four hours, the Atavarius was shadowed by other Mossad-operated vessels as it passed Crete and then the island of Cyprus.

A fast motor yacht crossed its path. It, too, was equipped with detection gear, including a powerful camera concealed in the side of the wheelhouse. On deck were two young women, sunbathing. They were cousins of the Cypriot sayan who owned the yacht and were being used as bait to attract interest from those on board the Atavarius. As the yacht cruised alongside, several of the commandos appeared at the deck rail, shouting and smiling at the women. In the wheelhouse, the sayan activated the camera to photograph the gesticulating men. His part in the surveillance over, he raced back to Cyprus. In his home the film was developed, and the prints were wired to Tel Aviv. Mossad’s computers identified three of the faces as known Arab terrorists. Condition yellow moved to red.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres ordered that the Atavarius be attacked. A plan to bomb it was considered and rejected. An air attack might be mistaken by Egypt as part of a preemptive strike; though diplomatic relations between Israel and its neighbor had survived a number of incidents, there was considerable tension and suspicion in Cairo about Tel Aviv’s activities. Peres agreed that the attack should be seaborne.

Six Israeli navy gunboats were fueled and armed with rockets. On board were units of the IDF Special Forces and Mossad operatives who were to interrogate any of the commandos taken alive. The gunboats set off in the early hours for Haifa, heading west out into the Mediterranean. They raced through the waters in stern-to-prow formation, so as to reduce the possibility of detection by radar on board the Atavarius. The Israelis had timed their attack to be launched with the rising sun immediately behind them.

At a little after 6:30 A.M., the Atavarius was sighted. In a textbook maneuver, the gunboats fanned out, attacking the merchantman from both sides, raking the hull and decks with rockets. On deck the commandos fired back. But their heavy armaments were still crated below, and their automatic rifles were no match for the superior firepower of the Israelis. In minutes the Atavarius was on fire and its crew and commandos began to abandon ship. Some were shot as they plunged into the sea.

In all, twenty crew and commandos were killed. Their bodies were all recovered. Eight survivors were taken prisoner. Before the gunboats raced back to Israel, they sank the Atavarius with rockets whose nose cones were filled with extra-powerful explosives.

The bodies of the dead were unceremoniously buried in the Negev Desert. The prisoners were tried in secret and sentenced to lengthy terms of imprisonment. During their interrogation, they had totally implicated Syria as the guiding force behind the incident. But, rather than launch an attack on its neighbor, the Israeli government, acting on the advice of Mossad, kept the incident secret. Mossad’s psychologists had predicted that the disappearance of the ship and its crew and passengers would become the subject of intense and increasingly fearful speculation among the Syrian-based PLO groups. Mossad also warned Prime Minister Peres that the one thing he could be certain of was that the terrorists, knowing their operation had failed, would be eager to regain face with their Syrian benefactors.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians continued to fulminate against Arafat and applaud the deadly war being waged against him by his onetime associate, Abu Nidal. Long deemed terrorism’s “grand master of the unexpected,” Nidal had fallen out with Arafat over tactics.

Arafat was slowly coming around to the idea that a movement that had nothing at its disposal but terrorism would ultimately fail; it needed a political program and a sense of diplomacy. Arafat had been trying to demonstrate that in his recent public statements, earning encouragement from Washington to continue on this new path. In Israel, Arafat’s words were seen as a sham. For Abu Nidal they were nothing but a betrayal of all he personally stood for — naked, unadulterated terrorism.

For months, Nidal had been biding his time. When he heard about the failure of the Atavarius mission and the way the ship had subsequently disappeared from the face of the earth, he decided the time had come to remind Israel he was still around. With the full connivance of his protectors in Syrian intelligence, Abu Nidal struck with horrific effect. At the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, his gunmen opened fire on helpless Christmas travelers. In as many seconds nineteen passengers, among them five Americans, were slaughtered at the El Al check-in counters at both airports. How had those terrorists been able to move unhampered around Italian police to reach their targets? Where were El Al’s own security men?

While answers to these urgent questions were being sought, Mossad’s strategists were also looking at other areas. Though Britain had joined in the total condemnation of the attacks, the country still maintained full diplomatic ties with Syria — despite Mossad having furnished MI5 with ample evidence of Damascus’s role in state-sponsored terrorism. It was not enough for the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to deliver forceful denunciations in Parliament of terrorism. There was a need for more direct action. However, in the past MI5 had reminded Mossad that even Israel had from time to time shown expedient self-interest, and accepted the need to trade with its sworn enemies. There had been its decision to free over a thousand Palestinian detainees — many convicted terrorists — only months before the Rome and Vienna airport bombings, in exchange for three Israeli soldiers held in Lebanon.

But now Mossad was determined to strike a telling blow to force Britain to sever all diplomatic ties with Damascus by closing down its London embassy, long regarded by Mossad as one of the core missions in Europe for plotting against Israel. Central to the plot would be Abu, the cousin of Nezar Hindawi.

After his dinner with Tov Levy, Abu sought out Hindawi, apologizing for his previous indifference about Ann-Marie. Of course he would help, but first he needed to have some answers. Was she going to keep the baby? Was she still pressing him to marry her? Did Nezar really love the girl? They came from different cultures and mixed marriages rarely worked.

Hindawi replied if he had ever loved Ann-Marie, he did not now. She had become shrewish and weepy, asking all the time what was going to happen. He certainly did not want to marry the chambermaid.

Abu gave his cousin ten thousand dollars — money enough, he said, for Hindawi to be rid of Ann-Marie and continue to live a bachelor’s life in London. The money had been provided by Mossad. In return Hindawi would have to do something for the cause they both believed in: the overthrow of Israel.

On the evening of April 12, 1986, Hindawi visited Ann-Marie in her rooming house in the Kilburn area of London. He brought flowers and a bottle of champagne, purchased with some of the money Abu had provided. He told Ann-Marie he loved her and wanted to keep the baby. The news brought tears to her eyes. Suddenly her world seemed a far better place.

Hindawi said there was one final hurdle to clear. Ann-Marie must get the blessing of his parents for them to marry. It was an Arabic tradition no dutiful son could flout. She must fly to the Arab village in Israel where his family lived. He painted a picture of their lifestyle having changed little since Christ had walked the earth. To a girl educated by nuns and for whom Mass had been an important part of her life, the imagery was final confirmation that she was making the right decision in marrying her lover. He and his family might not be Christians, but that did not matter; they came from the land of her Lord. In her eyes that made them God-fearing people. Nevertheless, Ann-Marie hesitated. She couldn’t just walk out of her job. And where would she get the money to pay the airfare? And for such an important meeting, she would need new clothes. Hindawi stilled her concerns by producing from his pocket a bundle of notes. He told her it was more than enough for her to buy a new wardrobe. With another flourish, Hindawi produced an El Al ticket for a flight on April 17, five days away. He had bought it that afternoon.

Ann-Marie laughed. “You were sure I would go?”

“As sure as I am of my love for you,” Hindawi replied.

He promised that once she returned to London they would be married. The next few days passed in a whirl for the pregnant chambermaid. She quit her job and visited the Irish embassy in London to collect a new passport. She shopped for maternity dresses. Every night she made love to Hindawi. Each morning, over a leisurely breakfast, she planned their future together. They would live in Ireland, in a little cottage by the sea. Their baby would be christened Sean if it was a boy. Sinead if a girl.

On the day of Ann-Marie’s departure, Hindawi told her he had arranged for her to collect a “gift” for his parents from a “friend” who was one of the cleaners on the air side of the airport.

Ari Ben-Menashe, who subsequently claimed to have detailed knowledge of the plot, insisted that “because Hindawi didn’t want to risk her being stopped for having too much carry-on luggage he had arranged for his friend to pass her the bag when she entered the El Al departure lounge.”

Her gullibility in not asking any questions about the “gift” was the reaction of a woman head over heels in love and completely trusting her lover. She was the perfect patsy in the accelerating plot.

In the taxi to the airport, Hindawi was the loving, concerned father-to-be. Would she make sure to do her breathing exercises during the long flight? She must drink plenty of water and sit in an aisle seat to avoid developing the cramps she had started to complain of. Ann-Marie had laughingly shushed him: “Holy be to God, you’d think I was flying to the moon!”

She had lingered at the door to the flight departure area, not wishing to be separated from him, promising to phone from Tel Aviv, saying she would love his parents like her own. He kissed her one last time, then gently pushed her into the line making its way toward the immigration-control desk.

Watching her until she was out of sight, Hindawi continued to follow the instructions given to him by Abu and boarded a Syrian Arab Airlines bus for the ride back into London. Meantime, the unsuspecting Ann-Marie had safely passed through passport control and UK security checks. Next she made her way to the high-security area reserved for the El Al flight. Shin Bet — trained agents carefully questioned her and inspected her hand baggage. She was assigned a seat and motioned through to the final departure lounge to join the other 355 passengers.

According to Ari Ben-Menashe, she was handed the “gift” for Hindawi’s parents by a man dressed in the blue coveralls of an airport cleaner. The man disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. Ben-Menashe would write: “Within seconds, Ann-Marie was asked to submit to a search. The El Al security people found plastic explosives in a false bottom in the bag.”

The explosives consisted of over three pounds of Semtex. Ann-Marie sobbed out her story to waiting Special Branch and MI5 officers. It was the tale of an ill-starred woman not only crossed in love but double-crossed by her partner. The officers concentrated on establishing Hindawi’s contacts with Syria after they realized Ann-Marie had been an innocent dupe.

As the airlines bus entered London, Hindawi ordered the driver to divert to the Syrian embassy. When the driver protested, Hindawi said he had the “authority” to do so. At the embassy, he asked consular officials to grant him political asylum. He told them he feared the British police were about to arrest him because he had tried to blow up an El Al plane for the “cause.” The astonished officials handed Hindawi over to two embassy security men. They asked him to remain in an embassy staff apartment after they questioned him. They might well have been suspicious that this was some sort of trap to embarrass Syria. If so, those fears would only have deepened when Hindawi left the apartment shortly after.

Hindawi had gone in search of Abu. Failing to find him, he checked into the London Visitors’ Hotel in the Notting Hill district, where he was arrested shortly afterward.

The BBC broadcast news of how the police had foiled the plot. The details were unusually precise: the Czech-made Semtex had been concealed in the false bottom of Ann-Marie’s bag and was primed to explode at thirty-nine thousand feet.

For Ben-Menashe, the operation had swiftly moved to a satisfying conclusion. “Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian embassy. Hindawi was jailed for forty-five years. Ann-Marie went home to Ireland where she gave birth to a daughter.” Abu returned to Israel, his role over.

After Hindawi’s trial, Robert Maxwell unleashed the Daily Mirror: “The bastard got what he deserved,” screamed an editorial. “Ambassador of Death,” shrieked a headline on the day of the expulsion of Syria’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. “Get Out, You Syrian Swine,” screamed another. Ari Ben-Menashe would be the first to claim that Mossad had pulled off a “brilliant coup which cast Syria into the political wilderness.”

But there were intriguing questions behind that clear-cut sentiment. Had Ann-Marie Murphy really been handed a working bomb, or had it been part of an elaborate scam? Was the man in blue coveralls — Hindawi’s supposed “friend”—a security officer? How much foreknowledge of the plot did MI5 have? And would it not have been unthinkable for Mossad and Britain’s security services to actually allow Semtex to be taken on board an airliner when there was even the remotest chance the bomb could have detonated on the ground? Such an explosion would certainly have devastated a sizable area of the world’s busiest airport at a time when thousands of people would have been in the area. Had the real brilliance of the coup been that Mossad had achieved the diplomatic castration of Syria at no risk at all to El Al and Heathrow by using a harmless substance resembling Semtex? To all such questions, Prime Minister Shimon Peres would only intone: “What happened is usually known to those who should know and whoever does not know should continue not knowing.”

From Britain’s high-security jail at Whitmoor, Hindawi has continued to protest he was a victim of a classic Mossad sting operation. White-haired and no longer slim, he says he expects to die in prison. He refers to Ann-Marie only as “that woman.” In 1998, she lives in Dublin raising their daughter, who, she is thankful, does not look like her lover. She never speaks of Hindawi.

There is one puzzling footnote to the story. Two weeks after Hindawi was sentenced to a prison sentence that would see him incarcerated well into the twenty-first century, Arnaud de Borchgrave, the respected editor of the Washington Times, placed his tape recorder on the desk of France’s prime minister, Jacques Chirac, in Paris. De Borchgrave was in Europe to attend the European Community foreign ministers’ meeting in London, and the interview with Chirac was to obtain a briefing on the French position. The interview had moved along predictable lines, with Chirac making it clear that France and Germany had been dragooned into a show of loyalty to the British government, which was proving to be increasingly intransigent over Common Market policies. De Borchgrave raised the question of France’s own relationship in another area. The editor wanted to know what stage Chirac’s negotiations had reached with Syria to end the spate of terrorist bombs in Paris, and of France’s efforts to free the eight foreign hostages held by the Hezbollah in Lebanon. The prime minister paused and looked across his desk, seemingly oblivious of the recorder. He then said that the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, had both told him that the Syrian government was not involved in Hindawi’s plan to blow up the El Al airliner; that the plot “was engineered by Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service.”

The resulting diplomatic furor nearly ruined Chirac’s career. He found himself being attacked on one side by his own president, François Mitterand, and on the other fending off furious telephone calls from Helmut Kohl demanding he must retract. Chirac did what politicians often do. He said he had been misquoted. In London, Scotland Yard said the matter had been fully dealt with by the courts and there was no need for further comment. In Paris, the office of Jacques Chirac — in 1997 president of France — said he had no recall of the interview with the Washington Times.

Soon another sting would leave Mossad with a further stain on its reputation.