Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The words convinced Zamir this was a coded order connected to a forthcoming terrorist attack. “Birthday candles” could refer to weapons; the most likely one with a candle connotation was a rocket. And a rocket would be the perfect way to destroy Golda Meir’s aircraft.

To warn her would be pointless. She was a women without fear. To alert the Vatican could well lead to the visit being canceled: the last thing the Holy See would want was to be caught up in a terrorist incident, especially one that would involve it having to condemn its Arab friends.

Zamir telephoned Hessner and Kauly, the two katsas who originally accompanied him to the Vatican, and moved Kauly from Milan to Rome. Then Zamir, accompanied by the small Mossad team traveling with Golda Meir, took the first flight to the city. Their mood was reflected in Zamir’s gallows humor that it could be the city of eternity for Golda Meir.

In Rome, Zamir laid out his fears to the head of DIGOS, the Italian antiterrorist squad. Its officers raided the apartment block from where the calls had been made to Bari and Ostia. A search of one of its apartments turned up a Russian instruction manual for launching a missile. Throughout the night, DIGOS teams, each accompanied by a Mossad katsa, carried out a series of raids on other known PLO apartments. But nothing more was found to confirm Zamir’s fears. With dawn breaking and Golda Meir’s plane due in a few hours, he decided he would concentrate his search in and around the airport.

Shortly after sunrise, Hessner spotted a Fiat van parked in a field close to the flight path. The katsa ordered the van driver to step out of the cab. Instead, the back door of the vehicle opened and there was a burst of gunfire. Hessner was unhurt but two terrorists in the back of the van were seriously wounded when he fired back. Hessner set off in foot pursuit of the driver, catching up with him as he tried to hijack a car—driven by Kauly. The two Mossad katsas bundled the luckless terrorist into the car and drove off at high speed to where Zamir had his mobile command post, a truck.

The Mossad chief had already received a radio message that the Fiat van contained six rockets. But he still had to know if there were more positioned elsewhere. The van driver was severely beaten before he revealed the whereabouts of the second set of rockets. Zamir suspected he was one of the men who had provided backup for the Munich massacre. Driving at full speed in the truck, Zamir, Hessner, and Kauly, with the now-battered terrorist slumped between them, headed north.

They spotted a van parked on the side of the road. Protruding from its roof were three unmistakable nose caps of missiles. In the distance, descending by the second, was the equally unmissable shape of Golda Meir’s 747, the sun illuminating its markings. Without slowing, Zamir used the truck as a battering ram, hitting the van side-on and toppling it onto its side. The two terrorists inside were half-crushed as the missiles fell on them.

Stopping only to toss the senseless driver out onto the road beside the van, Zamir drove off, alerting DIGOS that there had been “an interesting accident they should look into.” Zamir had briefly considered killing the terrorists, but he felt their deaths would serve as a serious embarrassment to Golda Meir’s audience with the pope.

Meir had the feeling that the weight of the world bore down on the pope’s narrow shoulders, threatening to crush his diminutive white-clad figure. At the end of the audience, in reply to her question, Paul said he would visit the Holy Land, and spoke of his pontificate being a pilgrimage. When she asked him about the possibility of Israel establishing formal ties with the Holy See he sighed and said the “time is not yet appropriate.” Golda Meir gave him a leather-bound book depicting the Holy Land; he handed her an inscribed copy of Humanae Vitae, the encyclical in which he had spelled out the consecration of his pontificate.

On her way out of the Vatican, Golda Meir told Zamir that the Holy See seemed to have a clock different from the rest of the world’s.

The Black September terrorists—who had taken part in the Munich massacre of Israel’s Olympic athletes—were taken to a hospital and, after they recovered, were allowed to fly to Libya. But within months they would all be dead—killed by Mossad’s kidon.

The biblical eye-for-an-eye retribution Golda Meir had authorized met with distaste from Pope Paul, whose entire pontificate was rooted in the power of forgiveness. It also strengthened the Vatican’s ties to the PLO, which John Paul II continued following his own election in 1978.

Since then the pope had received Yasser Arafat and senior aides in several lengthy private audiences, during which John Paul had each time reiterated his commitment to actively pursue a search for a Palestinian homeland. The PLO, now based in Tunisia, had a permanent liaison officer attached to the Secretariat of State, and the Holy See had its own envoy, Father Idi Ayad, assigned to the organization.

With his frayed cassock trailing in the desert dust, padre’s hat planted squarely above his pinched face, Ayad served with equal devotion pontiff and the PLO, even to having his bedroom wall decorated with framed and signed photographs of John Paul and Yasser Arafat. Ayad had helped Arafat draft a letter in 1980 to the pope that had delighted him: “Please permit me to dream. I am seeing you going to Jerusalem, surrounded by returning Palestinian refugees, carrying olive branches and spreading them at your feet.”

Ayad had suggested Arafat and the pontiff should exchange courtesies on their respective holy days: Arafat began to send John Paul a Christmas card, while the pope sent Arafat greetings on the prophet Muhammad’s birthday. The tireless priest had also brokered the meeting between the PLO foreign minister and Cardinal Casaroli, the Holy See’s secretary of state. Afterward the Middle East desk had been expanded and the papal nuncios, the Holy See’s ambassadors, were instructed to persuade governments to which they were accredited to support the PLO’s aspirations to nationhood. All these moves had dismayed Israel. Its official contacts were still limited to infrequent visits by a government official who would be granted only a few minutes in the papal presence.

The chilly relationship on both sides stemmed partly from a bizarre incident following the creation of Israel in 1948. The then secretary of state had sent an emissary to Israel’s attorney general, Haim Cohn, carrying a request that Israel should restage the trial of Christ and, of course, reverse the original verdict. Once that was done, the Vatican would formally recognize Israel. The importance of such a diplomatic tie was not lost on Cohn. But to achieve it in such a way he had found “capricious almost beyond belief. Such a trial would be pointless and anyway we had more pressing matters to settle—surviving against the onslaughts of our Arab neighbours. Rattling the bones of Christ’s biography was very low down on my list of priorities.”

After the monsignor was brusquely seen off by Cohn, the Vatican all but turned its back on Israel.

Since then there had been a glimmer of hope only when John Paul’s immediate predecessor, the frail Albino Luciano, hinted during his thirty-three days on the Throne of Saint Peter that he would consider establishing diplomatic ties with Israel. His death from a heart attack, allegedly brought about by the responsibility of his high office, had led to the election of Karol Wojtyla. Under his pontificate the Bronze Door of the Apostolic Palace remained all but closed to Israel as the papacy moved even further into international politics, encouraged to do so by its reestablished links with the CIA.