Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Yatom had shaken their hands and wished them luck, the standard benediction for any team leaving on a mission. The group had picked up their airline tickets and spent the next twenty-four hours in a Mossad safe house in the city.

Next Tuesday morning, February 20, they boarded El Al Flight 347 to Zurich, obediently arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, as requested by the airline, two hours before takeoff. They joined the lines of passengers, mostly Swiss nationals or Israelis, making their way through the security checks. By 9 A.M., the two couples were in their business-class seats and sipping champagne and discussing their forthcoming holiday. In the hold of the aircraft were their skis.

Waiting for them at Kloten Airport in Zurich was the katsa from the Brussels station with a minibus. He had assumed the role of their guide and had adopted the alias of “Ephrahim Rubenstein.”

By late afternoon they were installed in the safe house in Liebefeld. The two women cooked dinner and they all settled down to watch television. Early in the evening two rental cars arrived from Zurich, driven by sayanim. They left in the minibus, their role over. At around 1:00 A.M. on Saturday, February 20, the team left the safe house, each couple in a separate car. Rubenstein was in the first car, leading the way to Wabersackerstrasse. Reaching there, the two vehicles parked almost directly opposite the apartment block. There was no light from Zein’s apartment. The persons who called themselves Solly Goldberg, Rachel Jacobson, and Ephrahim Rubenstein walked quickly toward the glass door of the building. Rubenstein carried a roll of plastic, Goldberg the laptop, Jacobson a carrier bag containing the listening devices. Meantime, Leah Cohen and Matti Finklestein had enthusiastically begun to act out their lookout role, pretending to be lovers.

Across the street an elderly woman who suffered from insomnia—Swiss police would later insist on referring to her only as “Madam X”—was once more unable to sleep. From her bedroom window, she stared out at a strange sight. A man—Rubenstein—was draping plastic across the glass door to stop anyone’s looking into the apartment block opposite. Behind the sheet, she could see two other figures. Out in the street in a parked car was another shadowy couple. Just as Danny Yatom had warned, what she saw was certainly improper. The woman called the police.

At a little after 2:00 A.M., a BMW squad car arrived in the street, catching Cohen and Finklestein in midembrace. They were ordered to remain in the car. Meantime, police backup had arrived and the trio inside the lobby were asked to explain what they were doing. Goldberg and Jacobson said they had mistaken the building for one where friends lived and Rubenstein insisted he was taking down, not putting up the plastic.

Matters then became farcical. Goldberg and Jacobson asked permission to go to their car and check the address of their friends. No policemen accompanied them. At the same moment, Rubenstein fell to the ground, appearing to have suffered a heart attack. All the policemen gathered around to help and summon medical assistance. No one moved to stop the two cars as they raced out of Wabersackerstrasse into the frosty night. Shortly afterward, the cars stopped to transfer one couple into the other car. The foursome crossed the border into France in the small hours of the morning.

Meanwhile Rubenstein had been taken to the hospital. Doctors said he had not suffered a heart attack. He was taken into custody.

At 4:30 A.M. Tel Aviv time, Yatom was awoken at home by the night watch officer in Mossad headquarters and told what had happened. Not bothering to call his chauffeur, Yatom drove himself to headquarters.

After the Amman fiasco, a plan had been put in place to deal with further such disasters. The first step was for Yatom to call the senior duty officer at the foreign ministry. The officer telephoned the head of the prime minister’s office, who informed Benyamin Netanyahu. He called Israel’s ambassador to the European community in Brussels, Efraim Halevy. The English-born diplomat had spent nearly thirty years as a senior Mossad officer with responsibility for maintaining good relations with security services of foreign states that had diplomatic relations with Israel. He had also played an important role in patching up relations with Jordan after the bungled operation in Amman.

“Fix this, and you’ll be my friend for life,” Netanyahu was later quoted as saying to Halevy.

The ambassador had consulted the Filofax he carried everywhere before deciding whom to call first: Jacob Kellerberger, a senior officer at the Swiss foreign ministry. Halevy was at his diplomatic best: there had been a “regrettable incident” involving Mossad. How “regrettable”? Kellerberger had demanded. “Most regrettable,” Halevy had replied. The tone had been set, an understanding in the wind. Or so Halevy believed, until Kellerberger telephoned Switzerland’s federal prosecutor, Carla del Ponte.

With a jutting lower lip and steel-rimmed spectacles that matched those of Danny Yatom, del Ponte was a figure within the Swiss legal system as formidable as Yatom had once been in the Israeli intelligence community. Her first question set the tone she would maintain: Why had the Liebefeld police not arrested all the Mossad agents? Kellerberger did not know. Del Ponte’s next question raised a specter he was all too familiar with: Could the Mossad operatives have had a “Tehran connection”? Since the Gulf War, Israel had repeatedly claimed that several Swiss companies were supplying technology to Iran to produce missiles. Could the operation even be somehow connected with Israel’s other preoccupation over what had become known as the “Jewish gold scandal”? Swiss banks had concealed for their own profit huge sums of money deposited in their vaults before World War II by German Jews who later became victims of the Nazis.

Throughout the weekend of February 21–22, her questions continued while Halevy struggled to keep matters quiet.

He had not counted on the forces arraigned against Danny Yatom in Israel. Within Mossad, as news of the incident percolated through the organization, morale plunged even lower. This time Yatom could not blame Netanyahu for what had happened in Liebefeld. The prime minister had known nothing beforehand of the operation. From within the prime minister’s office whispers began to reach the Israeli media that Yatom was now doomed. For three more days, Efraim Halevy continued to plead and argue with Kellerberger to keep the incident quiet. But Carla del Ponte would have none of it. On Wednesday, February 25, she called a press conference to denounce Mossad: “What happened was unacceptable and disconcerting between friendly nations.”

Within hours, Danny Yatom had resigned. His career was over and Mossad’s reputation even more in tatters. In his last moments as director, he surprised staff who had assembled in the Mossad canteen. The cold Prussian image was replaced by an emotional tone: he was sorry to be leaving them at such a time, but he had tried to give them the best possible leadership. They should always remember Mossad was bigger than anyone. He ended by wishing whoever took over his place the very best of luck; he would need it. It was the nearest Yatom came to saying what he thought about a prime minister who continued to believe Mossad could be ultimately controlled from his office. Yatom walked out of the silent canteen. Only when he was in the corridor did the applause start, and it died as swiftly as it began.

A week later Efraim Halevy agreed to take over the service after Benyamin Netanyahu publicly acknowledged, the first time any Israeli prime minister had done so, “that I cannot deny that Mossad’s image has been affected by certain failed missions.”