Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

In Tel Aviv, a relieved Meir Amit watched other problems come and go. The question of providing enough supplies for eight days at sea had been solved by the operation’s supply officer visiting every shop in Cherbourg. But whenever shopkeepers pressed on him Christmas jambon, he politely refused. The quarter of a million liters of fuel had been smuggled on board in drums and hidden belowdecks. The one great imponderable was the weather. The boats would have to sail across the Bay of Biscay in winter conditions that could sink them. Meir Amit would recall that in Tel Aviv: “What we prayed for was Dunkirk weather. We had sent a meteorologist to Cherbourg and he monitored every forecast out of England, France, in Cherbourg and Spain.”

The hours ticked slowly by until finally it was Christmas Eve. The forecast in Cherbourg was for rain gusting out of the southwest. Nevertheless, the order was given to sail at 8:30 that night. By 7:30 P.M. the crews were all on board. But the weather worsened. A new departure time was set for 10:30 P.M. That came and went, halted again by the weather. From Tel Aviv came urgent coded signals: Sail no matter what the conditions.

In Cherbourg, the ranking Israeli naval officer ignored the pressure; for him the lives of his men were more important at that moment. In his command boat, he sat silently watching the meteorologist feverishly studying his weather charts. At midnight the weatherman announced: “The winds will drop and veer northerly in two hours. They will not be so strong and be behind us. We can go.”

At exactly 2:30 A.M. on Christmas Day, the boats’ engines started and the crafts headed slowly out to sea. Seven days later, on New Year’s Day, they sailed into Haifa Harbor.

Among those waiting on the quayside was Meir Amit. For him the New Year could not have had a better start. But he also knew President Charles de Gaulle would never forgive Israel for what had happened.

So it had proven to be the case. When Mossad came hunting Middle Eastern terrorists in Paris and other French cities, its katsas were as closely watched as any terrorist by the French security service. Worse, pro-Arab officers in the SDECE often tipped off the PLO that Mossad was about to launch a counterstrike. Too often a terrorist would slip away.

The most notorious of these was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, whose activities had earned him the nickname “Carlos the Jackal.” In Paris, he was the proverbial gun for hire in the service of one of the PLO breakaway groups based in Syria. His exploits had made him an admired figure in the Marxist underground press that flourished in Europe. Women found his playboy habits thrilling—the more so when he seemed able to flit at will in and out of the traps Mossad set to kill him. One day he would be on the Riviera sunning himself with a girl, the next he would be spotted in London with a group of Middle Eastern terrorists, helping them lay their plans against other Arab groups and, of course, Israel. Carlos and they operated without interference from Britain’s police and intelligence services on the understanding they would do no harm to British citizens. By the time Mossad was in a position to kill Carlos, he was back on the Continent, or had flown to Damascus, Baghdad, or other Arab countries to stoke up further mischief making.

Keeping track of Carlos long enough for Mossad to be able to assassinate him had become yet another task assigned to Ismail Sowan during his time in Paris.

His overall contribution to the war Mossad waged in France was considerable, allowing its katsas and kidons to claim spectacular successes: a PLO forgery factory producing false documents was firebombed; weapons caches were destroyed; couriers were intercepted and murdered; explosives smuggled in from Eastern Europe were blown up; in a dozen and more ways, Mossad fought fire with fire as a result of the intelligence Sowan provided.

In January 1984, Sowan was told by Adam, his Mossad controller, he was being sent to England, where he would pose as a mature student studying for a science degree. His new task would be to penetrate the PLO in London and discover everything he could about its active service unit, Force 17. It was now run by Abdul-Rahid Mustapha, who was using Britain as a base. Mustapha was on Mossad’s assassination list.

Ismail Sowan told the PLO office manager in Paris he had completed his French studies—a French sayan had produced a forged diploma to confirm this in case he was asked for proof, though no one did—and he wished to go to England to continue his quest for an engineering science degree. He even managed to slip in a reminder that the qualification would make him “even more useful when it came to bomb making.”

The prospect of adding another bomb maker to the PLO’s team of such experts was always welcome, and never more so than in 1984. The PLO leadership needed to show the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that they were not forgotten. Tens of thousands were suffering increasing hardship under Israeli occupation; they could not understand why Yasser Arafat did not do more to help them in a practical way: rhetoric was one thing, action another.

Mossad knew that Arafat was under growing pressure to support the peace overtures that Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, had started to make toward Israel. In Syria, the always unpredictable regime had decided to cool its relationship with the various Palestinian factions, and had imprisoned hundreds of its fighters. President Assad wanted to show the Americans he was not the troublemaker the world believed.

That only increased the feeling among the rank-and-file PLO in the camps that they would be cast adrift by the Arab world, shunted from place to place, left to fend for themselves. There was ugly talk of being betrayed by their own leadership. The Israelis continued to exploit this, broadcasting throughout the occupied territories that the PLO had assets of $5 billion, invested all over the world. Arafat had also become the victim of a separate smear campaign, created by Mossad’s experts in psychological warfare, which claimed he used some of the money to satisfy his liking for nubile young boys. The rumor was fed into the refugee camps and though not widely believed, it did have some effect. Arafat, in a shrewd move, ordered the seventeen PLO offices to leak a story that he had a healthy appetite for women—which was true.

For the PLO office manager in Paris, the idea that Sowan would use his hoped-for degree to become a bomb maker was indeed welcome news, and sufficient reason to provide Ismail’s train fare to England and a week’s living expenses. Sowan was also given five hundred pounds by Adam and told he must find a job to pay for his studies in Britain to avoid any suspicion.

Ismail arrived in London on a blustery day in February 1984, traveling on a Jordanian passport provided by Mossad. He had a second Canadian passport concealed in the false bottom of his suitcase. He had been told to use it only if he had to leave Britain in a hurry. Concealed with the passport was Mossad’s briefing about Abdul-Rahid Mustapha and the Force 17 he commanded.

The unit had originally been created as Yasser Arafat’s personal security force. Its name came from the number of Arafat’s telephone extension in the old PLO headquarters in Beirut. At one stage in Lebanon, Force 17 had grown to a ragtag army of over a thousand fighters; one of its units had been the notorious Black September group that had carried out the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Shortly before the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon and resettle in Tunis, Force 17’s original commander, Ali Hassan Salameh, was killed by the car bomb arranged by Rafi Eitan. In Tunis, Arafat had faced hard realities. He was not only hunted by Mossad, but had become increasingly threatened by other Arab extremists. Abu Nidal, who claimed he was the authentic voice of the armed struggle, said there could be no victory until Arafat was eliminated. Arafat’s response had been to restructure Force 17 into a close-knit unit with a dual purpose: to continue to protect him, and to launch well-prepared attacks against its enemies, beginning with Israel. Mustapha was given command of Force 17. In Tunis, his men were trained by both Chinese and Russian Special Forces in guerrilla warfare. In 1983, Mustapha began to travel to Britain to recruit mercenaries.