Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 15 THE EXPENDABLE CARTOONIST

Nahum Admoni’s demise as director general of Mossad began on a July afternoon in 1986, the result of an incident on one of those Bonn streets built in the post — World War II building boom in Germany. Forty years later the street had become a mature avenue with small but well-kept front gardens and maids’ quarters in the rear. Security systems were discreetly hidden behind wrought-iron gates and the lower windows were mullioned, the result of using bottle glass.

No one saw the person who left a plastic carrier bag in the telephone booth at the end of the street. A police patrol car spotted it and stopped to investigate. The bag contained eight freshly minted blank British passports. The immediate reaction of the local office of the Bundeskriminal Amt (BKA), the equivalent of the FBI, was that the passports were for one of the terrorist groups who had brought terrorism to the streets of Europe with a series of violent and brutal bombings and kidnappings.

Representing causes and minorities from all corners of the world, they were determined to force their way to a role in setting the agenda for international policy. They had found ready support from the radical student politics that had swept Britain and the Continent. Since 1968, when Leila Khaled, a young Palestinian woman revolutionary, hijacked a jet plane to London and was promptly released because the British government feared further attacks, naive students had chanted the agitprop slogans of the PLO. Those middle-class young radicals had a romanticized view of the PLO as “freedom fighters” who, instead of taking drugs, took the lives of the bourgeoisie, and instead of holding sit-ins, held hostages.

The BKA assumed that the passports had been left by a student acting as a courier for a terrorist group. The list of groups was dauntingly long, ranging from the IRA or Germany’s own Red Army Faction to foreign groups like the INFS, Islamic National Front of Sudan; the ELN, the National Liberation Army of Colombia; the MDRA, the Angola Liberation Movement; or the LTTE, the Tamil Tigers. These and many more had cells or cadres through the Federal Republic. Any one of them could be planning to use the passports to attack one of the British military bases in Germany or travel to Britain and stage an outrage there.

Despite being Western Europe’s leading former imperial power, initially Britain had only encountered continued terrorism at the hands of the IRA. But its intelligence services had warned it was only a matter of time before other foreign groups, allowed to operate against their own countries from London, would drag Britain into their machinations. A foretaste of what could happen came when a group opposed to the Tehran regime took over the Iranian embassy in 1980. When negotiations failed, the Thatcher government sent in the SAS, who killed the terrorists. That well-publicized action had led to a sudden decline in Middle Eastern plots hatched in London. Instead, Paris had become the battleground for bloody internal conflicts between various foreign organizations, most notably Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Abu Nidal and his gunmen. Mossad had also done its share of killing Arab enemies on the streets of the French capital.

The BKA believed the passports found in the Frankfurt telephone kiosk were the precursor of more slaughter. The agency called in the BundesNachrichten Dienst (BND), the republic’s equivalent of the CIA, who informed the MI6 liaison officer attached to BND headquarters in Pullach, in southern Germany. In London, MI6 established that the passports were expert forgeries. That ruled out the IRA and most other terrorist groups. They did not have the capability to produce such high-quality documents. Suspicion switched to the KGB; their forgers were among the best in the business. But the Russians were known to have a stockpile of passports and certainly it was not their style to use a phone booth as a pickup point. The South African security service, BOSS, was also ruled out. It had virtually stopped operating in Europe, and false British passports were hardly needed in the unsophisticated African countries where BOSS now concentrated its activities. MI6 turned to the only other intelligence service who could make good use of the passports — Mossad.

Arie Regev, an attaché at the Israeli embassy in London who was also the resident katsa, was invited to meet a senior MI6 officer to discuss the matter. Regev said he knew nothing about the passports but agreed to raise the matter with Tel Aviv. Back came the swift response from Nahum Admoni: the passports had nothing to do with Mossad. He suggested that they could be the work of the East Germans; Mossad had recently discovered that the Stasi, the East German security service, was not above selling fake passports to Jews desperate to travel to Israel, in return for hard currency. Admoni knew the passports had been created by Mossad forgers — and were intended to be used by katsas working under cover in Europe and to enable them to more easily enter and leave Britain.

Despite an “understanding” with MI5 that Rafi Eitan had originally helped hammer out, in which Mossad agreed it would keep MI5 informed of all operations inside Britain, the agency was secretly running an agent in England in the hope it would lead to a double triumph for Mossad: killing the commander of the PLO’s elite Special Forces unit — Force 17—and ending Yasser Arafat’s increasing success in establishing a relationship with the Thatcher government.

In London, no longer was Arafat’s name synonymous with terrorism. Mrs. Thatcher had slowly become convinced that he could bring about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East that would both recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and assure the security of Israel. Jewish leaders were more skeptical. They argued it was only terrorism that had brought the PLO to the stage at which it was now, and that the organization would continue to use the threat of more terrorist actions unless all its demands were met. Not for the first time, London was unmoved by Tel Aviv’s protestations. Mossad continued to regard Britain as a country which, despite the outcome of the Iranian embassy siege, was becoming too ready to support the Palestinian cause. There was already concern within Mossad over the way the PLO had managed to cozy up to the CIA.

Contacts between the United States and the PLO would later be precisely dated by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. He would reveal in his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, that six weeks after the U.S. ambassador to Sudan was shot dead in Khartoum by Black September gunmen, a secret meeting took place, on November 3, 1973, between CIA deputy director, Vernon Walters, and Yasser Arafat. The outcome was a “nonaggression pact” between the United States and the PLO. Kissinger subsequently wrote: “Attacks on Americans, at least by Arafat’s faction of the PLO, ceased.”

When he learned of the pact, Yitzhak Hofi fumed that in the long history of expediency, there had never been a worse example. Using his back channel to the CIA, Hofi tried to have Walters cancel the agreement. The CIA deputy director said that was not possible and warned Hofi that Washington would regard it as an “unfriendly act” if news of the pact became public. It was a shot across the bow not to let loose Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare on friendly journalists.

Hofi’s anger became apocalyptic when he discovered whom Arafat had put in charge of administering the PLO end of the pact: Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince, the Black September group leader who had planned the Munich massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Khartoum; Salameh, the man whose life would finally end the way it had been lived, in a powerful explosion arranged by Rafi Eitan. But that was still some years away. In 1973, Salameh was a revered figure within the PLO and Arafat had no hesitation about appointing him to liaise with the CIA. What genuinely shocked Mossad was that the CIA had accepted the Red Prince barely a year after the Munich killings and the murder of the U.S. envoy in Khartoum.

Soon Salameh was a regular visitor to CIA headquarters at Langley. Usually accompanied by Vernon Walters, the Red Prince would stride across the Agency’s marble-floored entrance, past the guards, and ride in the elevator to the seventh floor, where Walters had his spacious office. Their meetings would be interrupted to join CIA’s senior officers in their special dining room. Walters would unfailingly pay for the Red Prince’s meal; there was no such thing as a free lunch at Langley.

What passed between Salameh and the CIA has remained secret. Bill Buckley, who later died at the hands of terrorists in Beirut when he was CIA station chief, would claim that “Salameh played a large part in winning the hearts and minds of the U.S. for the PLO. He was charismatic and persuasive and knew when to argue and when to listen. And, in intelligence terms, he was a super informer.”

An early example was when Salameh warned the CIA of an Iran-brokered plot to shoot down Kissinger’s plane when it next flew into Beirut during the secretary’s shuttle for peace. Next, Salameh brokered a deal in which the PLO escorted 263 westerners in West Beirut to safety during the height of the Lebanese civil war. Shortly afterward, the Red Prince gave the CIA warning of an attempt to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. Then, in yet another meeting with the CIA, the Red Prince wrote and signed a “non-assassination guarantee” for all U.S. diplomats in Lebanon. In Beirut the repeated joke was “It pays to live in the same building as American diplomats because the PLO security is so good.”

Yitzhak Hofi, then head of Mossad, had demanded the CIA break off all contacts with the Red Prince. The request was ignored. Around CIA headquarters at Langley, Salameh was increasingly known as “the bad guy who has come good for us.” He continued to provide intelligence and operational information that kept the CIA fully briefed on the Middle East and had become its most important asset in the region. When he was finally killed, the CIA was enraged, and its relations with Mossad were cool for a considerable time.

One U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Hermann Eilts, later said after Salameh’s own assassination: “I know that on a good many occasions, in a nonpublic fashion, he was extraordinarily helpful, assisting with security for American citizens and officials. I regard his assassination as a loss.”

Now, six years later, the PLO was once more beguiling the government of Margaret Thatcher while its Force 17, under a new leader, continued to kill Israelis. Nahum Admoni decided he would succeed where his predecessors had failed. He would disrupt the PLO’s relationship with Britain and, at the same time, kill the Force 17 commander. The success of the operation would turn out to depend on a young Arab who, as a boy, had prayed in his village mosque that Allah would give him the strength to murder as many Jews as possible.

Ismail Sowan’s potential had been spotted ten years before. In 1977, when Sowan was still a teenager living in a West Bank village, an Israeli army intelligence officer had interviewed him as part of a routine updating of the IDF’s profile of the area.

The Sowan family had settled there in the 1930s, a time when the revolt against the British mandate and the Jews had heated the blood of all Arabs. Everywhere there was violence; bloodshed had begotten bloodshed. Ismail’s father had joined the Palestine Arab Party, organizing protests and raising nationalist feeling in his community. At first his fury had been against the British. But when they withdrew from Palestine in 1948, the new Jewish state became a prime target. Ismail’s first remembered words were to chant hatred for the Jews.

Throughout his childhood the one word that he heard most often was “injustice.” It was force-fed to him at school; it filled the conversations around the family dinner table: the terrible injustice done to his people, his family, himself.

Then, shortly after his fifteenth birthday, he witnessed a brutal attack on a bus filled with Jewish pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Women and children had been slaughtered by Arabs. That night Ismail had asked a question that would change forever his thinking: Supposing the Jews were entitled to defend what they had? All else had flowed from that: his steady alienation from the violence of his companions, his belief that Jew and Arab could live together, must live together. With this came a conviction that if he could do anything to achieve that, he would.

Two years later, barely seventeen, he had sat down and told the IDF intelligence officer what he still felt. The officer had first listened intently, then thoroughly questioned Ismail. How could he have turned his back on all his people’s beliefs, which were like a tocsin sounding a single note: that Arabs were the wronged ones, that they must fight to the death for what they believed was right? The officer’s questions had been many and Ismail’s answers long.

The officer noted that, unlike other young Arabs living under Israeli rule, Sowan had few objections to the stringent security the army imposed. Refreshingly, the slightly built youth with an engaging smile seemed to understand why the Israelis had to do this. All that really concerned him was that the regular army clampdown meant he could not go to school in East Jerusalem to study his favorite subject, science.

Sowan’s file made its way through the IDF intelligence community, flagged as someone worth further investigation, finally reaching the desk of a Mossad officer. He passed it over to recruitment.

Ismail Sowan was invited to travel to Tel Aviv, ostensibly to discuss his future education; he had recently applied to go to Jerusalem to study. Ismail was questioned for an entire afternoon. First his interrogator explored Ismail’s knowledge of science and was satisfied with the answers. Then the whole Sowan family history was laid bare and Ismail’s answers checked against those given to the IDF intelligence officer. Finally, Ismail was told what was on offer. Mossad would pay for his education, provided he came through its training course. He must also understand that if he spoke a word of any of this to anyone; his life would be in danger.

It was a standard warning, given to all Arabs Mossad recruited. But to the idealistic Ismail Sowan, it was the chance he had been waiting for: to bring together Jew and Arab.

Sowan went through all the interview processes in safe houses before being sent to the training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He excelled in a number of subjects, showing a natural aptitude for computer skills and shaking off a tail. Not surprisingly, he scored high in the subjects dealing with Islam, and his paper on the role of the PLO in the Middle East conflict was sufficiently interesting to be shown to Mossad’s then chief, Yitzhak Hofi.

On completion of his training, Sowan became a bodel, a courier between headquarters and Israel embassies from where katsas operated under diplomatic cover. He began to shuttle around the Mediterranean, regularly visiting Athens, Madrid, and Rome, carrying documents in diplomatic pouches. Occasionally he traveled to Bonn, Paris, and London. The chance to see the world and be paid for it — he was getting five hundred dollars a month — was an exciting feeling for someone barely out of his teens.

What Sowan did not realize was the documents had no importance. They were part of yet another test — to see if he made any attempt to show them to an Arab contact he might have in any of the cities he visited. During each trip Sowan was shadowed by other newly qualified Israeli-born Mossad officers, practicing their own skills at surveillance. The person Ismail handed over the documents to at some prearranged meeting in a café or hotel lobby was not, as he imagined, an Israeli diplomat, but a Mossad officer.

After weeks of spending his free time abroad strolling around Rome’s Pantheon, visiting the Sistine Chapel, and exploring London’s Oxford Street, he was ordered to go to Beirut and join the PLO.

Enlisting was easy. He simply walked into a PLO recruiting office in West Beirut. The recruiter was intelligent and extremely well informed in political matters. He spent time exploring Ismail’s attitude toward the need for violence and whether Sowan was ready to eschew all previous affiliations — family and friends — in favor of becoming dependent upon the PLO for emotional support. He was told if he was accepted, it would mean a great change in his life: the organization would be his only protection against a hostile world. In return, the PLO would look to him to give unswerving loyalty.

His Mossad controller had prepared Sowan to give the correct responses, and he was sent to a training camp in Libya. There the indoctrination continued. He was taught in a dozen different ways that Israel was out to destroy the PLO, so it first must be destroyed. His tutors preached an acute hostility to everything and everyone outside the PLO. The lessons learned at the Mossad training school about role-playing were remembered; Sowan had spent many hours absorbing from his Mossad instructors the dynamics of terrorist groups, their likely behavior and tactics. In Libya, he was harangued that a murder was no more than a means to win liberation; a car bomb represented another step toward freedom; a kidnapping was a way to achieve justice. Ismail continued to show the skills Mossad had instilled. He accepted all the PLO training but never let it affect his core belief. He also displayed sufficient persistence, resourcefulness, and physical toughness to be singled out as more than a foot soldier. When he left the training camp, a place was found for him in the PLO operation echelons. Step by step he moved up the chain of command.

He met the organization’s leaders, including Yasser Arafat; he traveled to PLO training camps throughout the Middle East. Back in Beirut he learned to live under the Israeli air force raids, avoiding hiding underground because of the risk the building would be bombed and collapse on top of him. But somehow he managed never to miss an appointment with his Mossad controller, who regularly slipped into Lebanon to collect Sowan’s latest news.

Always he maintained his cover. When Ali Hassan Salameh was killed, Ismail Sowan led the chanting against the hated Israelis. Each time a PLO sniper shot an IDF soldier, he was among the cheerleaders. In all he said and did he appeared a fiercely committed militant.

In 1984, with Arafat driven out of Lebanon and regrouping in Tunis, the PLO sent Sowan to Paris to learn French. Nahum Admoni, who had by this time replaced Hofi, saw Sowan’s transfer as a golden opportunity to have an agent on the inside of the PLO’s burgeoning activities in Europe.

Arab ghettos in Paris’s Eighteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements had become a haven for terrorists; in the narrow streets where people lived on the edge of legality, there was ready shelter for the gunmen and bomb makers. From here had been launched the attacks on Jewish restaurants, shops, and synagogues. It was in Paris that the first joint communiqué had been signed by various terrorist organizations pledging united support to attack Israeli targets in all Europe.

Mossad had fought back with its renowned ruthlessness. Kidons had entered the Arab enclaves and killed suspected terrorists in their beds. One had his throat cut from ear to ear, another his neck wrung like a chicken. But these were small victories. Mossad knew that the terrorists retained the upper hand, largely because they were so well directed by the PLO. The prospect of having his own man inside the organization’s Paris operational headquarters was an exciting one for Admoni.

Within days of arriving in the French capital, Sowan made contact with his case officer, working out of the Israeli embassy at 3, rue Rabelais. He would only ever know him as Adam. They set up regular meeting points in cafés and on the Metro. Usually, Sowan would carry a copy of that day’s newspaper in which he had inserted his information. Adam would have a similar copy in which was concealed Sowan’s instructions and his monthly salary, now raised to one thousand dollars. In a technique they had both perfected at the Mossad training school, one would bump into the other and offer profuse apologies, and they would go their separate ways, having exchanged newspapers.

By this simple means, Mossad tried to regain the upper hand in a city that had long relished its reputation for offering sanctuary to political extremists — providing they left France alone. Only Mossad had chosen to break that understanding by launching an operation that delivered a blow to French pride that even now, almost twenty years later, France can neither forgive nor forget. The episode began three thousand miles away, at the Mediterranean mouth to the Suez Canal, designed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French visionary.

In a few shattering minutes on the afternoon of October 21, 1967, Israel had discovered its vulnerability to modern warfare. One of its flagships, an old World War II British destroyer renamed Eilat, on patrol off the Egyptian coast, was hit by three Russian Styx missiles fired from Port Said. Forty-seven Israeli sailors were killed and another 41 seriously injured out of a complement of 197 officers and men. The Eilat was sunk. It was not only the biggest sea disaster Israel had ever suffered, but the first time in the long history of naval warfare that a ship had been destroyed by long-range missile attack.

When the immediate magnitude of the calamity passed, Levi Eshkol’s government ordered a crash program to provide its navy with a new kind of ship to replace the outdated Eilat. In weeks, designers had come up with a gunboat that would be fast, highly maneuverable, and equipped with electronic countermeasures to provide the precious seconds needed to take evasive action against any future missile attack. An order to build seven of the boats was placed with the Chantiers de Construction Mécanique de Normandie, CCM, shipyard in Cherbourg, France.

While they were being constructed, scientists at Dimona were manufacturing the missiles the boats would carry, together with the sophisticated equipment to be fitted once they arrived in Israel.

Matters progressed uneventfully at Cherbourg until President de Gaulle introduced a total French arms embargo after Israel commandos attacked the Beirut airport on December 26, 1968, and destroyed thirteen parked Lebanese aircraft — a reprisal for a Palestinian attack on an El Al Boeing 707 at the Athens airport two days previously. The embargo meant the gunboats would not be handed over to Israel.

The French response ended a decade-long alliance with Israel. It had been forged during the Algerian revolution, which had finally led to the colony’s independence from France in 1962, and was partly rooted in a common hostility to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. During that time, Mossad had supplied intelligence about the anti-French FLN organization, and France had sold Israel arms and frontline Mirage fighter aircraft.

With the loss of Algeria, de Gaulle had quickly restored France’s traditional links with other Arab countries, and the PLO was allowed to open an office in Paris. The Beirut airport raid was seen by de Gaulle as a very public slight to his demand that Israel should not carry out what the president called “revenge attacks” against its Arab neighbors.

The French arms embargo effectively meant Israel would no longer have sufficient replacement Mirage aircraft to dominate the Middle East’s skies, or be able to effectively defend itself from seaborne attack. Perversely, the embargo came at a time when Israel was grappling with the price of its stunning victory in the Six Day War. In those few days in 1967, it had brought the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip under its control. With the land came almost a million Arabs, the great majority imbued with hatred for their conquerors.

For Meir Amit, the problem Israel faced “could not be overstated. Within our borders were thousands of mehabelim—the Hebrew for terrorist — and they had the support of the general Arab population who, at minimum, would give them succor and shelter: my first job was to increase Mossad’s targeting and penetration of all Palestinian organizations.”

Meir Amit was told by Israel’s new prime minister, Golda Meir, to devise a plan to get the completed boats out of France. He would recall: “The first suggestion was we should sail into Cherbourg with sufficient armed sailors and just take the boats and head back for Israel. Moshe Dayan, then minister of defense, sat on that — hard. He correctly pointed out that the international reaction would create huge repercussions and see Israel branded a thief. Whatever we did had to be done legally. We had to come up with a watertight right to sail out of French territorial waters. Once we were on the high seas, it would be a different matter.”

The legality of what was to follow would be in the eyes of the beholder. Despite Dayan’s insistence on the letter of the law being obeyed, what was contemplated was pure and simple trickery.

By November 1969, Meir Amit had the first stage of Operation Noah’s Ark in place. A London-based firm of lawyers had been briefed by Israel’s largest shipping company, Maritime Fruit — which freighted produce around the world — to register a new firm named Starboat, after the Star of David. Its principal shareholder was Mila Brenner, a director of Maritime Fruit. The other shareholders were proxies for Meir Amit. The second part of the operation went equally smoothly. For months Admiral Mordechai Limon, the Israeli navy liaison officer at Cherbourg for the gunboat project, had been discussing compensation with the shipyard for breach of contract; each time the French came close to an agreement, Limon had found a new point to argue. On November 10, he informed the shipyard that Israel was once more ready to discuss the matter.

In Tel Aviv, Mila Brenner had contacted one of the most respected shipping magnates in the world, Ole Martin Siem, based in Oslo. He agreed to join the board of Starboat for the specific purpose of purchasing the gunboats.

Limon, with a sleight of hand worthy of a card player, made his move. On November 11, he met with shipyard officials. He listened to their improved offer of compensation and said he was still not satisfied. The officials were astonished; their new offer was a generous one. While they contemplated what to do next, Limon hurried to Paris. Waiting there was Ole Siem. After the two men met, Limon telephoned the shipyard officials to say he would be in touch with them “in a few days.” Within the hour, Siem was seated in the office of General Louis Bonte, the French government’s arms salesman. Siem said he had heard that there “are some gunboats for sale that can be converted to drill for oil.”

Timing his intervention to perfection, Limon at that moment called Bonte to say he was in Paris and was ready to accept a final offer in compensation. The figure he proposed was the one the Cherbourg shipyard officials had offered. Bonte told Limon he was “in negotiation” and would call back. The general then turned to Siem and revealed the offer Limon had agreed to accept but said it was too high for the government to agree to pay. Siem promptly increased Limon’s offer by 5 percent. Bonte called back Limon and said his offer was most agreeable. Bonte believed he had made a good deal in ridding France of a thorny problem. Israel would get its compensation and France would have made a 5 percent profit.

He only had two questions for Ole Siem. Were the boats going to Norway? Could Siem guarantee they would not be reexported after their oil-exploration activities? Siem gave an unequivocal guarantee on both counts. Bonte accepted that, to avoid press inquiries about the site of the oil fields — a sensitive commercial matter in an industry renowned for its secrecy — the removal of the boats from Cherbourg would be done discreetly. A departure date was set for Christmas Eve, 1969, when Cherbourg would be celebrating the start of the holiday season.

There was still a month to go — and Meir Amit was only too well aware that that was more than enough time for things to go wrong. There would be a need to provide 120 Israeli sailors to crew the boats for the three-thousand-mile voyage from Cherbourg to Haifa. To send that many men at one time would most certainly alert the French security service. Once more the inventive Meir Amit had the answer.

He decided only two sailors at a time would travel together to cities all over Europe before going on to Cherbourg. The sailors were instructed not to stay in the port’s hotels for more than a night before moving to another one. They all traveled on Israeli passports so that, in case they were caught, they could not be charged with possessing forged travel documents. Nevertheless, Meir Amit knew the risks were still high. “It just needed one suspicious French policeman to ask why so many Jews were coming to Cherbourg for Christmas and the whole operation could be blown.”

By December 23, the sailors had all arrived in Cherbourg. Scattered around the town, they listened to the incessant carols; some who had been born and raised in Jerusalem joined in the singing.

In Tel Aviv, a relieved Meir Amit watched other problems come and go. The question of providing enough supplies for eight days at sea had been solved by the operation’s supply officer visiting every shop in Cherbourg. But whenever shopkeepers pressed on him Christmas jambon, he politely refused. The quarter of a million liters of fuel had been smuggled on board in drums and hidden belowdecks. The one great imponderable was the weather. The boats would have to sail across the Bay of Biscay in winter conditions that could sink them. Meir Amit would recall that in Tel Aviv: “What we prayed for was Dunkirk weather. We had sent a meteorologist to Cherbourg and he monitored every forecast out of England, France, in Cherbourg and Spain.”

The hours ticked slowly by until finally it was Christmas Eve. The forecast in Cherbourg was for rain gusting out of the southwest. Nevertheless, the order was given to sail at 8:30 that night. By 7:30 P.M. the crews were all on board. But the weather worsened. A new departure time was set for 10:30 P.M. That came and went, halted again by the weather. From Tel Aviv came urgent coded signals: Sail no matter what the conditions.

In Cherbourg, the ranking Israeli naval officer ignored the pressure; for him the lives of his men were more important at that moment. In his command boat, he sat silently watching the meteorologist feverishly studying his weather charts. At midnight the weatherman announced: “The winds will drop and veer northerly in two hours. They will not be so strong and be behind us. We can go.”

At exactly 2:30 A.M. on Christmas Day, the boats’ engines started and the crafts headed slowly out to sea. Seven days later, on New Year’s Day, they sailed into Haifa Harbor.

Among those waiting on the quayside was Meir Amit. For him the New Year could not have had a better start. But he also knew President Charles de Gaulle would never forgive Israel for what had happened.

So it had proven to be the case. When Mossad came hunting Middle Eastern terrorists in Paris and other French cities, its katsas were as closely watched as any terrorist by the French security service. Worse, pro-Arab officers in the SDECE often tipped off the PLO that Mossad was about to launch a counterstrike. Too often a terrorist would slip away.

The most notorious of these was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, whose activities had earned him the nickname “Carlos the Jackal.” In Paris, he was the proverbial gun for hire in the service of one of the PLO breakaway groups based in Syria. His exploits had made him an admired figure in the Marxist underground press that flourished in Europe. Women found his playboy habits thrilling — the more so when he seemed able to flit at will in and out of the traps Mossad set to kill him. One day he would be on the Riviera sunning himself with a girl, the next he would be spotted in London with a group of Middle Eastern terrorists, helping them lay their plans against other Arab groups and, of course, Israel. Carlos and they operated without interference from Britain’s police and intelligence services on the understanding they would do no harm to British citizens. By the time Mossad was in a position to kill Carlos, he was back on the Continent, or had flown to Damascus, Baghdad, or other Arab countries to stoke up further mischief making.

Keeping track of Carlos long enough for Mossad to be able to assassinate him had become yet another task assigned to Ismail Sowan during his time in Paris.

His overall contribution to the war Mossad waged in France was considerable, allowing its katsas and kidons to claim spectacular successes: a PLO forgery factory producing false documents was firebombed; weapons caches were destroyed; couriers were intercepted and murdered; explosives smuggled in from Eastern Europe were blown up; in a dozen and more ways, Mossad fought fire with fire as a result of the intelligence Sowan provided.

In January 1984, Sowan was told by Adam, his Mossad controller, he was being sent to England, where he would pose as a mature student studying for a science degree. His new task would be to penetrate the PLO in London and discover everything he could about its active service unit, Force 17. It was now run by Abdul-Rahid Mustapha, who was using Britain as a base. Mustapha was on Mossad’s assassination list.

Ismail Sowan told the PLO office manager in Paris he had completed his French studies — a French sayan had produced a forged diploma to confirm this in case he was asked for proof, though no one did — and he wished to go to England to continue his quest for an engineering science degree. He even managed to slip in a reminder that the qualification would make him “even more useful when it came to bomb making.”

The prospect of adding another bomb maker to the PLO’s team of such experts was always welcome, and never more so than in 1984. The PLO leadership needed to show the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that they were not forgotten. Tens of thousands were suffering increasing hardship under Israeli occupation; they could not understand why Yasser Arafat did not do more to help them in a practical way: rhetoric was one thing, action another.

Mossad knew that Arafat was under growing pressure to support the peace overtures that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had started to make toward Israel. In Syria, the always unpredictable regime had decided to cool its relationship with the various Palestinian factions, and had imprisoned hundreds of its fighters. President Assad wanted to show the Americans he was not the troublemaker the world believed.

That only increased the feeling among the rank-and-file PLO in the camps that they would be cast adrift by the Arab world, shunted from place to place, left to fend for themselves. There was ugly talk of being betrayed by their own leadership. The Israelis continued to exploit this, broadcasting throughout the occupied territories that the PLO had assets of $5 billion, invested all over the world. Arafat had also become the victim of a separate smear campaign, created by Mossad’s experts in psychological warfare, which claimed he used some of the money to satisfy his liking for nubile young boys. The rumor was fed into the refugee camps and though not widely believed, it did have some effect. Arafat, in a shrewd move, ordered the seventeen PLO offices to leak a story that he had a healthy appetite for women — which was true.

For the PLO office manager in Paris, the idea that Sowan would use his hoped-for degree to become a bomb maker was indeed welcome news, and sufficient reason to provide Ismail’s train fare to England and a week’s living expenses. Sowan was also given five hundred pounds by Adam and told he must find a job to pay for his studies in Britain to avoid any suspicion.

Ismail arrived in London on a blustery day in February 1984, traveling on a Jordanian passport provided by Mossad. He had a second Canadian passport concealed in the false bottom of his suitcase. He had been told to use it only if he had to leave Britain in a hurry. Concealed with the passport was Mossad’s briefing about Abdul-Rahid Mustapha and the Force 17 he commanded.

The unit had originally been created as Yasser Arafat’s personal security force. Its name came from the number of Arafat’s telephone extension in the old PLO headquarters in Beirut. At one stage in Lebanon, Force 17 had grown to a ragtag army of over a thousand fighters; one of its units had been the notorious Black September group that had carried out the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Shortly before the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon and resettle in Tunis, Force 17’s original commander, Ali Hassan Salameh, was killed by the car bomb arranged by Rafi Eitan. In Tunis, Arafat had faced hard realities. He was not only hunted by Mossad, but had become increasingly threatened by other Arab extremists. Abu Nidal, who claimed he was the authentic voice of the armed struggle, said there could be no victory until Arafat was eliminated. Arafat’s response had been to restructure Force 17 into a close-knit unit with a dual purpose: to continue to protect him, and to launch well-prepared attacks against its enemies, beginning with Israel. Mustapha was given command of Force 17. In Tunis, his men were trained by both Chinese and Russian Special Forces in guerrilla warfare. In 1983, Mustapha began to travel to Britain to recruit mercenaries.

London was awash with former SAS men and regular army veterans who had seen service in Northern Ireland and were looking for a new outlet for their killing skills. The pay as PLO instructors was good and many of the mercenaries had a strong anti-Semitic attitude. A number signed on and traveled to Tunisia to work in PLO training camps. Other instructors were drawn from the ranks of former French foreign legionnaires and, at one stage, even included a former CIA officer, Frank Terpil, who would later become briefly involved with Mehmet Ali Agca, the fanatic who shot Pope John Paul II.

For a whole year Mustapha had slipped in and out of Britain without MI5 or the Special Branch even realizing who he was. When Mossad informed them, the only action taken was for an MI5 officer to remind the PLO office in London it would be closed and its staff expelled at the first hint they were engaged in terrorist activity against Britain. But they could continue to fulminate against Israel.

An intriguing sidelight to the propaganda war came when Bassam Abu-Sharif, then Arafat’s chief media spokesman, was invited to meet novelist Jeffrey Archer. The PLO man would remember that Archer had explained “how we should develop and manage our media relations, how to organize our political activity, how to set about building contacts with British politicians and mobilize public opinion. I am extremely impressed.”

That meeting ensured that Archer’s name found its way onto Mossad’s computers.

To the furious Israelis it appeared Mustapha was under the protection of the British authorities and that any attempt to deal with him in Britain could have repercussions for Mossad.

Ismail Sowan’s task was to try to lead Mustapha into a trap outside the country, preferably in the Middle East, where waiting Mossad kidons could execute him. Sowan had been told by Adam in Paris he would work under the guidance of his Mossad controllers based at the Israeli embassy in London. The first was Arie Regev. The other was Jacob Barad, who looked after Israel’s commercial interests. A third London-based katsa, not working under diplomatic cover, was Bashar Samara, who would be Sowan’s main contact. Samara had asked a sayan employed by a London house-letting agency to rent an apartment for Sowan in the Maida Vale district of the city.

A few days after arriving in London, Sowan set up his first contact with Samara. The couple met beneath the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus. Each carried a copy of the Daily Mirror, newly acquired by Robert Maxwell. Using the technique of exchanging newspapers that had worked in Paris, Sowan obtained his six hundred pounds first month’s salary, together with instructions on how to find office work at the PLO office in London.

Many of those who worked there wanted to be on the cutting edge of the action, such as carrying messages to various PLO cells around Europe, flying to the Organization’s Tunis headquarters with particularly important information, and afterward waiting for hours for the chance just to glimpse Arafat. These young, committed revolutionaries had no interest in routine office work, clerking or filing, reading the newspapers, manning the phones. When Sowan volunteered for this work, he was promptly taken on at the London office.

Within a few days he had met Mustapha. Over tiny cups of sweet mint tea, they quickly developed a rapport. Both had a common background of having lived through the Israeli bombardment of Beirut. They had walked the same streets with the same quickness of eye and mind, passed the same gutted buildings pocked with so many holes they looked like latticework. Both had slept in a different bed each night and waited for the dawn when, over the crackling loudspeakers, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Each of them had taken his turn on PLO checkpoint duty in Beirut, waving the Palestinian ambulances through, stopping everyone else, and only running for cover when the whine of Israeli aircraft once more filled their ears. They had laughed over the memory of the old Beirut saying, “If you hear the bomb explode, you’re still alive.” So many memories; the cries of the dead and dying, the wail of the women, their looks of helpless hatred at the sky.

Sowan and Mustapha spent a whole day in communion with their past. Finally, Mustapha asked what Sowan was doing in London. To further his education so as to better serve the PLO, Ismail replied. In turn, he asked Mustapha what had brought him to England.

The question unleashed a flow of revelations. Mustapha described Force 17 exploits: how its commandos had been about to hijack an Israeli aircraft filled with German tourists when Arafat canceled the mission for fear of antagonizing German opinion. But Mustapha had carried the war against Israel into Cyprus and Spain. Ismail knew that everything his companion boasted of would only make Mossad more determined to kill him.

They agreed to meet in a few days at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner, London’s traditional venue for all kinds of opinion to be freely aired. Ismail Sowan called the special number he had been given if he had urgent news. Bashar Samara answered. They arranged to meet in Regent Street. Strolling among the lunchtime office workers, Sowan reported what Mustapha had told him. Samara said he would be at Speakers’ Corner to photograph Mustapha and then tail him wherever he went.

Mustapha did not keep the appointment. It would be weeks before Sowan saw him again. By that time, Ismail had been accepted as a student by a college in Bath, the spa resort. Twice a week he traveled to London to visit the PLO office to carry out his clerking. On one trip, Mustapha was there.

Once more the two men spoke over endless cups of mint tea. From his briefcase, Mustapha produced an illustrated book recording the history of Force 17. He boasted over one hundred thousand copies were to be distributed to Palestinians. Leafing through it, Ismail saw a picture of Mustapha taken in Lebanon. With a flourish, Mustapha signed it and presented the book to Ismail. Once more they arranged to meet, but Mustapha again broke the appointment.

Meanwhile, Sowan had handed over the book to Samara at what became a regular meeting place, the Bath railway station. The katsa would travel down on one train and return to London on the next, taking with him anything Sowan had learned at the PLO office and handing over his monthly stipend of six hundred pounds to the informer.

For almost a year their relationship continued in this manner. By then, Sowan had met an English girl named Carmel Greensmith. She agreed to marry him. But on the eve of the ceremony, Sowan had still not settled on a best man.

Making another trip to the PLO office, he again met Mustapha, who, as usual, did not explain where he had been. Mustapha had with him a bundle of tear sheets from the London-published Arab newspaper, Al-Qabas. Each page contained a biting cartoon mocking Yasser Arafat. The newspaper was subsidized by the Kuwaiti ruling family, long an enemy of the PLO.

The cartoons were the work of the Arab world’s most celebrated political artist, Naji Al-Ali. Based in London, he had waged a one-man war against Arafat, portraying the PLO leader as venal, self-serving, and politically inept. The cartoons had established Al-Qabas as the voice of opposition to Arafat.

Mustapha threw the tear sheets on the table and said Al-Ali deserved to die and his Kuwaiti paymasters taught a lesson.

Sowan smiled noncommittally. Mossad welcomed anything that undermined Arafat’s position. He also brought up a matter of more immediate personal concern, finding a best man for his wedding. Mustapha immediately offered himself for the role. They embraced each other in Arab fashion. That may well have been the moment when Ismail Sowan wished he could somehow remove himself from the clutches of Mossad.

In Tel Aviv, Nahum Admoni had begun to wonder how long it would be before MI5 discovered the truth about the eight forged British passports left in the telephone booth in Germany in July 1986. Shimon Peres, no admirer of Mossad, was, in the closing months of his coalition government, asking pointed questions. The prime minister was saying the debacle would ruin Israel’s relationship with the Thatcher government; that it was better to make a clean breast of the matter, in keeping with the well-known Peres sentiment, “The sooner said, the sooner mended.”

Admoni opposed the idea. It could lead to MI5 and the Special Branch beginning an investigation into just what else Mossad was doing in Britain. That could result in Ismail Sowan being expelled; he had proven to be a mine of useful information. Further, to admit the truth about the passports would be to reveal a piece of incompetent bungling by Mossad.

The passports had been intended for the Israeli embassy in Bonn. The job of couriering them from Tel Aviv had been given to a bodel who was new to the job and had never been to Bonn before. He had driven around the city for a while, not wishing to ask directions for fear of drawing attention to himself. Finally he had used the pay phone to call the embassy. An official had berated him for his tardiness. Either through panic or sheer carelessness, the bodel had left the carrier bag in the phone booth. Arriving at the embassy he realized his mistake but, even more panic-stricken, he couldn’t remember exactly the location of the street from where he had made the call. Accompanied by the embassy’s furious head of security, they had finally found the phone box. The bag was gone. The bodel had been posted to the Negev. But the problem of the passports had continued to trouble Admoni. The Foreign Office, through Britain’s Tel Aviv ambassador, was raising the matter with the Israeli government.

One of the passports had been intended for Sowan’s use to enable him to travel more easily between London and Tel Aviv; a British passport meant he would be subjected to fewer checks by immigration at Heathrow than with his Canadian one.

In the time Sowan had been in London, he had made occasional trips to Israel to visit his family; it was part of his cover to do so. To them he was still a PLO activist. He played the role so convincingly that his elder brother, Ibrahim, finally warned him the Israelis would arrest him. He jokingly suggested Ismail should preempt matters by offering to work for the Organization. Ismail pretended to be horrified at the idea and returned to London to continue his work.

Soon matters were taking an unexpected turn. Sowan’s new wife had urged her husband to accept a post as a researcher at Humberside College in Hull. For her it would mean more money to supplement his office work for the PLO. She knew nothing of her husband’s relationship with Mossad, or the six hundred pounds it paid him every month. For Ismail the move to Hull could be an opportunity to escape the ever-increasing demands of his Mossad controller.

Like many an informer who had taken the Mossad shekel, Ismail Sowan had become badly frightened by the risks he faced. After performing his duties as best man, Mustapha had become even friendlier. He regularly dropped in to see Ismail and his wife, bringing gifts from the Middle East for the couple. Over dinner, Mustapha told stories of how he had dealt with the latest enemy of the PLO. Over the months, he boasted of killing several “traitors to the cause.” Sowan had sat mesmerized, hoping “my heart beat wasn’t thumping too loud.” He was becoming equally frightened after his meetings with Samara; the katsa was asking him to access the PLO office computer and photocopy sensitive documents; he was also to try to arrange to go on “holiday” with Mustapha to Cyprus, where a kidon team would be waiting. So far, Sowan had managed to come up with excuses — he was never able to be alone in the computer room, or the pressure of his studies meant he had to forgo holidays — but he had sensed a growing threat behind Samara’s demands. In Hull, he hoped he would be in less contact with both Mustapha and Samara, and be allowed to have an academic life without further pressures. Mossad had very different plans for him.

On Friday, March 13, 1987, Mossad’s headquarters on King Saul Boulevard buzzed with the rumor that Admoni was expecting an important visitor. Shortly before noon, the MI6 liaison officer was escorted up to the director general’s ninth-floor office. Their meeting was short. Admoni was told that MI6 was satisfied that the forged passports found in Germany were the work of Mossad. A Special Branch officer who had been involved in the operation recalled in June 1997 how “the man from Six just walked in, said ‘Good morning, ’ declined a cup of tea or coffee, and spelled it out. He then nodded and walked out again. It probably took less than a minute for him to deliver the message.”

In London, the Foreign Office called in the Israeli ambassador and delivered a strong protest accompanied by a demand that such behavior would not happen again. The only small comfort for Admoni was that no one had mentioned Ismail Sowan.

In the early evening of July 22, 1987, Ismail Sowan turned on the BBC early-evening television news in his Hull apartment. He had not heard from Mossad since April, when Bashar Samara had traveled to Hull for a meeting at the city’s railway station and told Sowan to keep a low profile until further notice — unless Mustapha made contact.

Now, the face of the man Mustapha had said deserved to die filled the screen; Naji Al-Ali, the cartoonist, had been shot as he left the offices of Al-Qabas in London. The gunman had fired once and disappeared. The bullet had entered through the cartoonist’s cheek and lodged in his brain. Sowan’s first reaction was that the assailant was not from Mossad or Force 17. Both organizations used the same professional way of killing: several shots in the head and the upper body. This looked like an amateur attack. The TV report said a massive police hunt was under way and that the cartoonist’s colleagues were hinting the attack was because of the unnamed “powerful enemies” Naji had made.

Sowan remembered a previous conversation with Mustapha. He became increasingly certain Yasser Arafat had ordered the shooting. He suddenly wondered if he was the only person Mustapha had confided in about the need for the cartoonist to die. Sowan decided it would be best for him and his wife to fly to Tel Aviv. But even as they packed, there was a knock on the front door. Sowan would recall:

“The man had two suitcases. He said Mustapha needed to hide them urgently. When I said I wanted to know what was inside, he just smiled and told me not to worry. ‘He who asks no questions is told no lies,’ was all he would say. When he was gone, I looked inside the cases. They were full of arms and explosives: enough Semtex to blow up the Tower of London; AK-47s, pistols, detonators, the works.”

Ismail called the special Mossad contact number in London. It had been disconnected. He telephoned the Israeli embassy. He was told that Arie Regev and Jacob Barad were not available. He asked to speak to Bashar Samara. The voice at the other end of the phone asked him to wait. A new voice came on the line. When Ismail gave his name, the voice said, “This is a good time for a holiday in the sun.” The words were a signal for Sowan to travel to Tel Aviv.

There, in the Sheraton Hotel, he met Jacob Barad and Bashar Samara. He explained what he had done after discovering the contents of the suitcase. They told him to wait while they reported to their superiors. Later that night, Samara returned and told Sowan to fly to London on the next plane. When he arrived he would find everything had been taken care of.

Not suspecting what lay ahead, Sowan flew to London on August 4, 1987. He was arrested by armed Special Branch officers at Heathrow and charged with the murder of Naji Al-Ali. When he protested he was a Mossad agent, the officers laughed at him. Sowan had become as expendable as the cartoonist who had died after two weeks clinging to life in hospital. Sowan would be sacrificed in an attempt to regain favor with the Thatcher government. The presence of the arms cache in Sowan’s apartment would destroy any effort he made to claim he was employed by Mossad. The arms had been brought there by a Mossad sayan.

In London, Arie Regev had turned over to MI5—who passed it on to Scotland Yard — all the “evidence” Mossad had “accumulated” of Sowan’s “involvement” with terrorism. The file detailed how Mossad had tailed Sowan through the Middle East, Europe, and Britain, never able to obtain enough proof until now. The moment the arms cache had been discovered, Mossad decided, “in the name of common security,” to turn in Sowan.

The decision to do so was a grim reminder of Mossad’s unwritten law of expediency. A great deal of time and money had been invested by the service in training and supporting Sowan in the field. But when the time came, all that counted for nothing when weighed against the greater need for Mossad to cover its own tracks in Britain. Sowan would be the sacrificial victim, served up to the British as an example of the kind of terrorist Mossad was always warning about. There would be a loss, of course: Sowan had done a good enough job — even if he had failed to deliver all that was asked of him. But the arms cache had been too good an opportunity to miss. It would wreck the PLO’s relationship with the Thatcher government and allow Israel to present Yasser Arafat as the double-dealing terrorist Mossad still said he was. And there would always be another Ismail Sowan ready to be seduced by men in Israel who reveled in broken promises.

For a full week Mossad relaxed, convinced that whatever Sowan told his British interrogators could be shrugged off.

But Admoni had not counted on Sowan’s desperate efforts to stay out of jail. He gave Special Branch interrogators detailed descriptions of his controllers as well as everything he had been taught by Mossad. The police gradually realized Ismail could be telling the truth. The MI6 liaison officer in Tel Aviv was recalled. He questioned Sowan. Everything he said about Mossad’s headquarters and its methods fit what the officer knew. The full extent of Mossad’s role began to unravel.

Regev, Barad, and Samara were expelled from Britain. The Israeli embassy in London issued a defiant statement: “We regret that Her Majesty’s Government saw fit to take measures of the kind adopted. Israel did not act against British interests. The struggle against terrorism was its one and only motive.”

Telling the truth did not save Ismail Sowan. In June 1988, he was sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment for possessing firearms on behalf of a terrorist organization.

Five years after the expulsion of the three katsas, which had effectively closed down Mossad’s station in Britain, the service was back. By 1998, five katsas worked out of the Israeli embassy in Kensington, liaising with MI5 and the Special Branch in targeting Iranian factions in Britain.

Three years previously, in December 1994, Ismail Sowan had been released from Full Sutton Prison, handed back his Jordanian passport, and deported on a plane to Amman. The last anyone saw of him was walking out of the airport carrying the suitcase Mossad had given him all those years ago when he had traveled to London. But its false bottom had been removed.

From the desert kingdom he had a ringside seat at the gathering storm in the Persian Gulf, which was preceded by a change of watch commander on the Mossad bridge. Nahum Admoni’s eight years at the helm finally ended on the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. Into his place stepped Shabtai Shavit, who inherited a series of failures: the Pollard affair, Irangate, and, of course, those blank, forged British passports found in that Frankfurt phone box, which had heralded the end of Admoni’s tenure. But, for his successor, beyond Jordan more than a sandstorm blew. Saddam Hussein had finally decided the time had come to take on the world.