Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

From Britain’s high-security jail at Whitmoor, Hindawi has continued to protest he was a victim of a classic Mossad sting operation. White-haired and no longer slim, he says he expects to die in prison. He refers to Ann-Marie only as “that woman.” In 1998, she lives in Dublin raising their daughter, who, she is thankful, does not look like her lover. She never speaks of Hindawi.

There is one puzzling footnote to the story. Two weeks after Hindawi was sentenced to a prison sentence that would see him incarcerated well into the twenty-first century, Arnaud de Borchgrave, the respected editor of the Washington Times, placed his tape recorder on the desk of France’s prime minister, Jacques Chirac, in Paris. De Borchgrave was in Europe to attend the European Community foreign ministers’ meeting in London, and the interview with Chirac was to obtain a briefing on the French position. The interview had moved along predictable lines, with Chirac making it clear that France and Germany had been dragooned into a show of loyalty to the British government, which was proving to be increasingly intransigent over Common Market policies. De Borchgrave raised the question of France’s own relationship in another area. The editor wanted to know what stage Chirac’s negotiations had reached with Syria to end the spate of terrorist bombs in Paris, and of France’s efforts to free the eight foreign hostages held by the Hezbollah in Lebanon. The prime minister paused and looked across his desk, seemingly oblivious of the recorder. He then said that the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, and foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, had both told him that the Syrian government was not involved in Hindawi’s plan to blow up the El Al airliner; that the plot “was engineered by Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service.”

The resulting diplomatic furor nearly ruined Chirac’s career. He found himself being attacked on one side by his own president, François Mitterand, and on the other fending off furious telephone calls from Helmut Kohl demanding he must retract. Chirac did what politicians often do. He said he had been misquoted. In London, Scotland Yard said the matter had been fully dealt with by the courts and there was no need for further comment. In Paris, the office of Jacques Chirac—in 1997 president of France—said he had no recall of the interview with the Washington Times.

Soon another sting would leave Mossad with a further stain on its reputation.

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.