Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Yatom left office with the first ripples of a sensation beginning to emerge over the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. A dedicated Israeli investigative reporter, Barry Chamish, had privately gathered medical and ballistics reports and eyewitness accounts from Rabin’s bodyguards, his widow, surgeons, and nurses, together with members of the Israeli intelligence community he had spoken to. Much of it was evidence given in closed court.

By 1999 Chamish, at risk to himself, had begun to publish his findings over the Internet. They are an eerie replay of the doubts raised about a lone gunman in the John Kennedy assassination in 1963. Chamish’s closely argued conclusions are, if nothing else, intriguing. He has concluded, “The gunman theory, accepted by the Israeli Government’s Shamgar Commission into the Rabin assassination, is a cover-up in what was to be a staged, unsuccessful assassination to rekindle Rabin’s flagging popularity with the electorate. Yogal Amir had agreed to perform the lone gunman function for his controller or controllers in the Israeli intelligence community.

“Amir fired a blank bullet. And he fired just one shot, not the alleged three. Israeli police lab ballistic tests on a shell casing found at the scene do not match Amir’s gun. No blood was seen coming from Rabin. Then there is the mystery of how Rabin’s car got lost for eight to twelve minutes on what should have been a forty-five-second drive to hospital on clear streets cordoned off by police for the peace rally Rabin had been attending.”

Chamish’s most explosive allegation—like all the others he has made, this one has yet to be refuted by any Israeli official in authority—claims: “During that strange drive to hospital by a very experienced chauffeur, Rabin was shot twice by real bullets and they came from the handgun of his own bodyguard Yoram Rubin. His gun disappeared at the hospital and has never been found. Two bullets retrieved from the prime minister’s body went missing for eleven hours. Rubin later committed suicide.”

Chamish spoke to the three operating room surgeons who fought to save the prime minister’s life. The reporter discussed the testimony of police officers who had been present when Amir fired. The officers had all testified that when Yitzhak Rabin was placed in the car, he showed no visible wounds. The surgeons were adamant. When the prime minister finally reached the hospital, he showed clear signs of having sustained a massive chest wound and severe damage to his spinal cord in the lower neck area. The surgeons insisted there was no possible gunshot wound that would have allowed Rabin to leave the attack site showing no evidence of a wound and arrive at the hospital with multiple damage.

The Shamgar Commission concluded it had found no evidence to confirm those wounds had occurred. Subsequently the doctors have refused to discuss the matter.

Outside Chamish’s own investigation, there is independent sworn testimony to support his contention that “what happened is deep and is conspiratorial.”

At his arraignment hearing, Amir had told the court: “If I tell the truth, the whole system will collapse. I know enough to destroy this country.”

A Shin Bet agent who was close to Amir when he fired at Rabin testified : “I heard a policeman shout to people to calm down. The shot is a blank.” His evidence was given in closed court.

Leah Rabin stated at the same hearing that her husband did not stagger and fall after apparently being shot at close range. “He was standing and looking very well.” She also insisted she was kept from seeing her husband for a full hour after she had arrived at the hospital and, according to Chamish, was told by a high-ranking intelligence officer that she should “not worry as the whole thing had been staged.”

The prime minister’s widow has steadfastly refused to make any public comment on this or any aspect of her husband’s murder.

Chamish believes she had been scared into silence like seventeen nurses at the hospital where Rabin was admitted on that day. “The plan was evil and brilliant. They persuaded Rabin to let someone take a pot shot at him to help him regain his popularity. That was why he did not wear a bulletproof vest. Amir was carefully selected for his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. He was a dupe in the hands of his controller or controllers. What he couldn’t possibly know was how they would use his blank shot to murder Rabin in his car on the way to hospital.”

Barry Chamish does not fit the image of a “conspiracy nut.” He is careful in what he writes and overwhelms every piece of evidence with corroborative testimony. He has been slow to rush to judgment and gives the impression there is a great deal more he can say but won’t—yet. More certain, Chamish is a man who walks his own path, is beholden to no one and, most important of all, is trusted.

He has posted all the evidence he has so far obtained on the Internet, doing so partly as insurance and partly because he wants to get the truth out. He is also realistic enough to accept it may never surface in a form suitable for a court of law.

On a damp spring morning in 1997, David Kimche instructed Arab landscapers how he wanted his garden rearranged in a Tel Aviv suburb. His manner was diffident, the mellifluous voice more suited to a college campus than dealing with manual workers, suggesting Kimche was descended from generations of administrators who had once raised Britain’s Union Jack over far-flung lands. The English-born son of middle-class Jews, Kimche’s impeccable manners deepened the image of the quintessential Englishman. Expensively tailored clothes emphasized a figure kept trim with regular workouts and a strict diet.

Kimche looked twenty years younger than his close to sixty years and there was a boyish quality about him. His every gesture while briefing the gardeners—the flicking away of hair from his forehead, the lengthy pauses, the thoughtful stare—suggested a lifetime spent cloistered on a college campus.

In reality, David Kimche had been what Meir Amit called “one of the intellectual powerhouses” behind many Mossad operations. His reasoning skills had been accompanied by breathtaking nerve, catching even the wariest with some totally unexpected move that had quickly earned the respect of even cynical colleagues. But his very intellectualism had often made them keep their distance; he was too remote and abstract for their earthy ways. Several felt like Rafi Eitan, “that if you said ‘good morning’ to David, his mind would already be deciding how ‘good’ it was and how much of the morning was left.”

Within Mossad, Kimche was widely regarded as the epitome of the gentleman spy with the cunning of an alley cat. His journey into the Mossad fold began after he left Oxford University with a First in Social Science in 1968. A few months later he was recruited by Mossad, then newly under the command of Meir Amit, who was seeking to introduce into its ranks a sprinkling of university graduates to complement the ruthlessness of men like Rafi Eitan who had learned their skills in the field.

How, where, and by whom Kimche was recruited was something he would forever keep under lock and key. The rumor mills of the Israeli intelligence community offered several scenarios: that he had signed on over a good dinner with a London publisher, a Jew who had long been a sayan; that the proposition came in a rabbi’s office in a Golders Green synagogue; that a distant relative had made the first move.

The only certainty is that one spring morning in the early Sixties, Kimche walked into Mossad’s headquarters building in Tel Aviv, the newest member of the Planning and Strategy Department. To one side was a branch of the Bank of Israel, several business offices, and a café. Uncertain what to do or where to go, Kimche waited in the cavernous lobby. How different it was from the imposing entrance of the CIA he had read about. At Langley the agency proudly proclaimed its existence in marble on the floor with an inlaid sixteen-pointed star on a shield dominated by the head of a bald eagle in profile, accompanied by the words “Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America.” Set in a wall were the words of the apostle John about people being set free by the truth. Beyond the plaque were banks of elevators, guarded by armed guards.