Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

But here, in the somewhat shabby lobby of the building on King Saul Boulevard, were only bank tellers at their stations and people seated on the café’s plastic chairs. Not one of them looked remotely likely to be a Mossad employee. In the far corner of the lobby an unmarked door opened and a familiar figure emerged, a consular officer at the Israeli embassy in London who had supplied Kimche’s travel documents. Leading Kimche back to the door, he explained that his own diplomatic status protected his real work as a Mossad katsa in Britain. At the door he handed Kimche two keys and said that from now on they would be his only means to enter Mossad headquarters. One key opened the door, the second the elevators that rose through Mossad’s eight floors. The headquarters was “a building within a building” with its own utilities—power, water, sanitation—separate from the rest of the tower block.

It had become Mossad’s headquarters shortly after the end of the Suez War in 1956.

That year, in October, British, French, and Israeli forces had launched a joint invasion of Egypt to recapture the Suez Canal, which Egyptian president Gamal Nasser had nationalized. The invasion had the hallmark of the “gunboat diplomacy” that for so long had dominated the region. The United States had almost no prior warning of an invasion that had turned out to be the last gasp of both British and French domination of the Middle East. Washington had exerted massive diplomatic pressure to stop the fighting, fearing that it would draw the Soviet Union into the conflict on the side of Egypt, creating a superpower confrontation. When the fighting ended on the banks of the Suez Canal, Britain and France found they had been replaced by the United States as the dominating foreign power in the Middle East. But Israel insisted on retaining the land it had captured in the Sinai Desert. Richard Helms, a future director of the CIA, flew to Tel Aviv and was received by senior staff in Mossad’s headquarters. They struck Helms “like a bunch of Realtors, proudly pointing out the amenities.”

Riding up in the elevator, Kimche’s guide explained that the lower floor housed the listening and communications center; on the next floor came the offices of junior staff. Upper floors were given over to analysts, planners, and operations personnel. Research and Development had a floor to itself. On the top floor were the offices of the director general and his senior aides.

Kimche was given space among the planners and strategists. His office was equipped like all the others: a cheap wooden desk, a steel filing cabinet with only one key, a black telephone, and an internal directory stamped “Do Not Remove.” A strip of carpet completed the furnishings. The office was painted olive green and offered a fine panoramic view over the city. Thirteen years on, the headquarters showed signs of wear and tear; paint had cracked on some walls and carpeting needed replacing.

But, despite these failings, David Kimche sensed he had arrived at an eventful time. Meir Amit was about to leave, shortly to be followed by Rafi Eitan and other senior Mossad officers.

Kimche soon came to recognize the quirks of colleagues: the analyst who invariably prefaced a judgment with the words “this is a European maneuver, classic as Clausewitz in its way”; the head of department who signaled an action by stuffing black flakes of tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and when the smoke came out white, he had made a decision; the strategist who always ended a briefing by saying espionage was a continuous education in human frailty. These were all men who had earned their dues and they welcomed Kimche’s enthusiasm and his ability to turn a problem on its head. They also sensed he fully understood that solving an enemy’s deceptions was as important as perpetuating Mossad’s own.

Part of his work included monitoring events in Morocco; there were still a substantial number of Jews living there under the repressive regime of King Hassan. In an attempt to make their lives easier, Meir Amit had established a “working relationship” with the monarch’s feared security service, finding common cause in trying to remove Egypt’s President Nasser, whose own hatred of Israel was only equaled by what he felt for the king. Nasser saw the monarch as a stumbling block to his dream of establishing a powerful Arab coalition stretching from the Suez Canal to the Atlantic coast of Morocco. The potential threat to Israel of such a coalition had persuaded Meir Amit to train the king’s men in counterintelligence and interrogation techniques that stopped little short of sophisticated torture.

Within Morocco, a small but equally ruthless opposition survived, led by Mehdi Ben-Barka. Kimche had charted Ben-Barka’s career: the king’s loyal tutor; onetime president of Morocco’s national consultative assembly, a virtually toothless parliament that merely rubber-stamped Hassan’s increasingly oppressive decrees against his people. Finally Ben-Barka had become the one authentic voice of opposition to Hassan. Time and again Ben-Barka had barely escaped being captured by the king’s men. But knowing it was only a matter of time before he was arrested, the charismatic former schoolteacher had fled to Europe. From there he continued to plot the downfall of Hassan.

Twice Ben-Barka’s small but efficient resistance movement in Morocco had come close to launching successful bomb plots against the monarch. The enraged Hassan ordered Ben-Barka tried in absentia and sentenced to death, and Ben-Barka responded by ordering fresh attacks against the king.

In May 1965, Hassan asked Mossad to help deal with Ben-Barka. The task of evaluating the request was given to David Kimche. Later that month he traveled on his British passport to London. Ostensibly he was on vacation. In reality he was finalizing his plans. Equipped with a perfectly doctored second British passport provided by a sayan, and with a Moroccan visa, Kimche flew to Rome; he spent a day there sightseeing—a move to make sure he was not being followed—and then traveled on to Morocco.

He was met at Rabat Airport by Muhammed Oufkir, the country’s fearsome minister of the interior. That night, over a dinner enlivened by the presence of some of the country’s best belly dancers, Oufkir spelled out what the king wanted: Ben-Barka’s head. Displaying both a crude sense of humor and an appreciation of Jewish history, Oufkir had added: “After all, your Jewish Salome asked your King Herod for the head of a troublemaker.”

Kimche said that while that was indeed correct, it really was not a matter for him. Oufkir would have to come back with him to Israel.

Next day the two men flew to Rome and caught a flight to Tel Aviv. Meir Amit met them in a safe house. He was polite but cautious. He told Kimche he was “not very excited” at the prospect of doing Oufkir’s dirty work and insisted our “involvement would be confined to preparatory work.”

Unknown to Meir Amit, Oufkir had already made an arrangement with a faction within France’s intelligence service, SDECE, to murder Ben-Barka if he could be lured out of his fortresslike home in Geneva and across the Swiss border into France. Still reluctant, Meir Amit had insisted that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol must personally sanction Mossad’s involvement. The prime minister gave it.

Mossad set to work. A Moroccan-born katsa traveled to Geneva and infiltrated Ben-Barka’s circle. Over several months, the agent carefully planted the idea that he had access to a sympathetic French millionaire who would like to see King Hassan topped and genuine democracy come to Morocco. Kimche had created this fiction. On October 26, 1965, he learned that Ben-Barka, “like the Scarlet Pimpernel of old,” was about to travel to Paris.