Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Sowan’s file made its way through the IDF intelligence community, flagged as someone worth further investigation, finally reaching the desk of a Mossad officer. He passed it over to recruitment.

Ismail Sowan was invited to travel to Tel Aviv, ostensibly to discuss his future education; he had recently applied to go to Jerusalem to study. Ismail was questioned for an entire afternoon. First his interrogator explored Ismail’s knowledge of science and was satisfied with the answers. Then the whole Sowan family history was laid bare and Ismail’s answers checked against those given to the IDF intelligence officer. Finally, Ismail was told what was on offer. Mossad would pay for his education, provided he came through its training course. He must also understand that if he spoke a word of any of this to anyone; his life would be in danger.

It was a standard warning, given to all Arabs Mossad recruited. But to the idealistic Ismail Sowan, it was the chance he had been waiting for: to bring together Jew and Arab.

Sowan went through all the interview processes in safe houses before being sent to the training school on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. He excelled in a number of subjects, showing a natural aptitude for computer skills and shaking off a tail. Not surprisingly, he scored high in the subjects dealing with Islam, and his paper on the role of the PLO in the Middle East conflict was sufficiently interesting to be shown to Mossad’s then chief, Yitzhak Hofi.

On completion of his training, Sowan became a bodel, a courier between headquarters and Israel embassies from where katsas operated under diplomatic cover. He began to shuttle around the Mediterranean, regularly visiting Athens, Madrid, and Rome, carrying documents in diplomatic pouches. Occasionally he traveled to Bonn, Paris, and London. The chance to see the world and be paid for it—he was getting five hundred dollars a month—was an exciting feeling for someone barely out of his teens.

What Sowan did not realize was the documents had no importance. They were part of yet another test—to see if he made any attempt to show them to an Arab contact he might have in any of the cities he visited. During each trip Sowan was shadowed by other newly qualified Israeli-born Mossad officers, practicing their own skills at surveillance. The person Ismail handed over the documents to at some prearranged meeting in a café or hotel lobby was not, as he imagined, an Israeli diplomat, but a Mossad officer.

After weeks of spending his free time abroad strolling around Rome’s Pantheon, visiting the Sistine Chapel, and exploring London’s Oxford Street, he was ordered to go to Beirut and join the PLO.

Enlisting was easy. He simply walked into a PLO recruiting office in West Beirut. The recruiter was intelligent and extremely well informed in political matters. He spent time exploring Ismail’s attitude toward the need for violence and whether Sowan was ready to eschew all previous affiliations—family and friends—in favor of becoming dependent upon the PLO for emotional support. He was told if he was accepted, it would mean a great change in his life: the organization would be his only protection against a hostile world. In return, the PLO would look to him to give unswerving loyalty.

His Mossad controller had prepared Sowan to give the correct responses, and he was sent to a training camp in Libya. There the indoctrination continued. He was taught in a dozen different ways that Israel was out to destroy the PLO, so it first must be destroyed. His tutors preached an acute hostility to everything and everyone outside the PLO. The lessons learned at the Mossad training school about role-playing were remembered; Sowan had spent many hours absorbing from his Mossad instructors the dynamics of terrorist groups, their likely behavior and tactics. In Libya, he was harangued that a murder was no more than a means to win liberation; a car bomb represented another step toward freedom; a kidnapping was a way to achieve justice. Ismail continued to show the skills Mossad had instilled. He accepted all the PLO training but never let it affect his core belief. He also displayed sufficient persistence, resourcefulness, and physical toughness to be singled out as more than a foot soldier. When he left the training camp, a place was found for him in the PLO operation echelons. Step by step he moved up the chain of command.

He met the organization’s leaders, including Yasser Arafat; he traveled to PLO training camps throughout the Middle East. Back in Beirut he learned to live under the Israeli air force raids, avoiding hiding underground because of the risk the building would be bombed and collapse on top of him. But somehow he managed never to miss an appointment with his Mossad controller, who regularly slipped into Lebanon to collect Sowan’s latest news.

Always he maintained his cover. When Ali Hassan Salameh was killed, Ismail Sowan led the chanting against the hated Israelis. Each time a PLO sniper shot an IDF soldier, he was among the cheerleaders. In all he said and did he appeared a fiercely committed militant.

In 1984, with Arafat driven out of Lebanon and regrouping in Tunis, the PLO sent Sowan to Paris to learn French. Nahum Admoni, who had by this time replaced Hofi, saw Sowan’s transfer as a golden opportunity to have an agent on the inside of the PLO’s burgeoning activities in Europe.

Arab ghettos in Paris’s Eighteenth and Twentieth Arrondissements had become a haven for terrorists; in the narrow streets where people lived on the edge of legality, there was ready shelter for the gunmen and bomb makers. From here had been launched the attacks on Jewish restaurants, shops, and synagogues. It was in Paris that the first joint communiqué had been signed by various terrorist organizations pledging united support to attack Israeli targets in all Europe.

Mossad had fought back with its renowned ruthlessness. Kidons had entered the Arab enclaves and killed suspected terrorists in their beds. One had his throat cut from ear to ear, another his neck wrung like a chicken. But these were small victories. Mossad knew that the terrorists retained the upper hand, largely because they were so well directed by the PLO. The prospect of having his own man inside the organization’s Paris operational headquarters was an exciting one for Admoni.

Within days of arriving in the French capital, Sowan made contact with his case officer, working out of the Israeli embassy at 3, rue Rabelais. He would only ever know him as Adam. They set up regular meeting points in cafés and on the Metro. Usually, Sowan would carry a copy of that day’s newspaper in which he had inserted his information. Adam would have a similar copy in which was concealed Sowan’s instructions and his monthly salary, now raised to one thousand dollars. In a technique they had both perfected at the Mossad training school, one would bump into the other and offer profuse apologies, and they would go their separate ways, having exchanged newspapers.

By this simple means, Mossad tried to regain the upper hand in a city that had long relished its reputation for offering sanctuary to political extremists—providing they left France alone. Only Mossad had chosen to break that understanding by launching an operation that delivered a blow to French pride that even now, almost twenty years later, France can neither forgive nor forget. The episode began three thousand miles away, at the Mediterranean mouth to the Suez Canal, designed by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French visionary.

In a few shattering minutes on the afternoon of October 21, 1967, Israel had discovered its vulnerability to modern warfare. One of its flagships, an old World War II British destroyer renamed Eilat, on patrol off the Egyptian coast, was hit by three Russian Styx missiles fired from Port Said. Forty-seven Israeli sailors were killed and another 41 seriously injured out of a complement of 197 officers and men. The Eilat was sunk. It was not only the biggest sea disaster Israel had ever suffered, but the first time in the long history of naval warfare that a ship had been destroyed by long-range missile attack.