Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

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 .