Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

In London, no longer was Arafat’s name synonymous with terrorism. Mrs. Thatcher had slowly become convinced that he could bring about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East that would both recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and assure the security of Israel. Jewish leaders were more skeptical. They argued it was only terrorism that had brought the PLO to the stage at which it was now, and that the organization would continue to use the threat of more terrorist actions unless all its demands were met. Not for the first time, London was unmoved by Tel Aviv’s protestations. Mossad continued to regard Britain as a country which, despite the outcome of the Iranian embassy siege, was becoming too ready to support the Palestinian cause. There was already concern within Mossad over the way the PLO had managed to cozy up to the CIA.

Contacts between the United States and the PLO would later be precisely dated by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. He would reveal in his memoirs, Years of Upheaval, that six weeks after the U.S. ambassador to Sudan was shot dead in Khartoum by Black September gunmen, a secret meeting took place, on November 3, 1973, between CIA deputy director, Vernon Walters, and Yasser Arafat. The outcome was a “nonaggression pact” between the United States and the PLO. Kissinger subsequently wrote: “Attacks on Americans, at least by Arafat’s faction of the PLO, ceased.”

When he learned of the pact, Yitzhak Hofi fumed that in the long history of expediency, there had never been a worse example. Using his back channel to the CIA, Hofi tried to have Walters cancel the agreement. The CIA deputy director said that was not possible and warned Hofi that Washington would regard it as an “unfriendly act” if news of the pact became public. It was a shot across the bow not to let loose Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare on friendly journalists.

Hofi’s anger became apocalyptic when he discovered whom Arafat had put in charge of administering the PLO end of the pact: Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince, the Black September group leader who had planned the Munich massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Khartoum; Salameh, the man whose life would finally end the way it had been lived, in a powerful explosion arranged by Rafi Eitan. But that was still some years away. In 1973, Salameh was a revered figure within the PLO and Arafat had no hesitation about appointing him to liaise with the CIA. What genuinely shocked Mossad was that the CIA had accepted the Red Prince barely a year after the Munich killings and the murder of the U.S. envoy in Khartoum.

Soon Salameh was a regular visitor to CIA headquarters at Langley. Usually accompanied by Vernon Walters, the Red Prince would stride across the Agency’s marble-floored entrance, past the guards, and ride in the elevator to the seventh floor, where Walters had his spacious office. Their meetings would be interrupted to join CIA’s senior officers in their special dining room. Walters would unfailingly pay for the Red Prince’s meal; there was no such thing as a free lunch at Langley.

What passed between Salameh and the CIA has remained secret. Bill Buckley, who later died at the hands of terrorists in Beirut when he was CIA station chief, would claim that “Salameh played a large part in winning the hearts and minds of the U.S. for the PLO. He was charismatic and persuasive and knew when to argue and when to listen. And, in intelligence terms, he was a super informer.”

An early example was when Salameh warned the CIA of an Iran-brokered plot to shoot down Kissinger’s plane when it next flew into Beirut during the secretary’s shuttle for peace. Next, Salameh brokered a deal in which the PLO escorted 263 westerners in West Beirut to safety during the height of the Lebanese civil war. Shortly afterward, the Red Prince gave the CIA warning of an attempt to assassinate the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. Then, in yet another meeting with the CIA, the Red Prince wrote and signed a “non-assassination guarantee” for all U.S. diplomats in Lebanon. In Beirut the repeated joke was “It pays to live in the same building as American diplomats because the PLO security is so good.”

Yitzhak Hofi, then head of Mossad, had demanded the CIA break off all contacts with the Red Prince. The request was ignored. Around CIA headquarters at Langley, Salameh was increasingly known as “the bad guy who has come good for us.” He continued to provide intelligence and operational information that kept the CIA fully briefed on the Middle East and had become its most important asset in the region. When he was finally killed, the CIA was enraged, and its relations with Mossad were cool for a considerable time.

One U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, Hermann Eilts, later said after Salameh’s own assassination: “I know that on a good many occasions, in a nonpublic fashion, he was extraordinarily helpful, assisting with security for American citizens and officials. I regard his assassination as a loss.”

Now, six years later, the PLO was once more beguiling the government of Margaret Thatcher while its Force 17, under a new leader, continued to kill Israelis. Nahum Admoni decided he would succeed where his predecessors had failed. He would disrupt the PLO’s relationship with Britain and, at the same time, kill the Force 17 commander. The success of the operation would turn out to depend on a young Arab who, as a boy, had prayed in his village mosque that Allah would give him the strength to murder as many Jews as possible.

Ismail Sowan’s potential had been spotted ten years before. In 1977, when Sowan was still a teenager living in a West Bank village, an Israeli army intelligence officer had interviewed him as part of a routine updating of the IDF’s profile of the area.

The Sowan family had settled there in the 1930s, a time when the revolt against the British mandate and the Jews had heated the blood of all Arabs. Everywhere there was violence; bloodshed had begotten bloodshed. Ismail’s father had joined the Palestine Arab Party, organizing protests and raising nationalist feeling in his community. At first his fury had been against the British. But when they withdrew from Palestine in 1948, the new Jewish state became a prime target. Ismail’s first remembered words were to chant hatred for the Jews.

Throughout his childhood the one word that he heard most often was “injustice.” It was force-fed to him at school; it filled the conversations around the family dinner table: the terrible injustice done to his people, his family, himself.

Then, shortly after his fifteenth birthday, he witnessed a brutal attack on a bus filled with Jewish pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. Women and children had been slaughtered by Arabs. That night Ismail had asked a question that would change forever his thinking: Supposing the Jews were entitled to defend what they had? All else had flowed from that: his steady alienation from the violence of his companions, his belief that Jew and Arab could live together, must live together. With this came a conviction that if he could do anything to achieve that, he would.

Two years later, barely seventeen, he had sat down and told the IDF intelligence officer what he still felt. The officer had first listened intently, then thoroughly questioned Ismail. How could he have turned his back on all his people’s beliefs, which were like a tocsin sounding a single note: that Arabs were the wronged ones, that they must fight to the death for what they believed was right? The officer’s questions had been many and Ismail’s answers long.

The officer noted that, unlike other young Arabs living under Israeli rule, Sowan had few objections to the stringent security the army imposed. Refreshingly, the slightly built youth with an engaging smile seemed to understand why the Israelis had to do this. All that really concerned him was that the regular army clampdown meant he could not go to school in East Jerusalem to study his favorite subject, science.