Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ hotel and shot and killed him.¹⁴ In the months since the Munich massacre, the Mossad had struck five times: against Black September with the Wrath of God assassinations in Rome, Paris, and Cyprus between October and January; against the PFLP with the devastating attack on the PFLP camps in Tripoli, Lebanon, in February, and again against Black September with the audacious April assault in Beirut. The Palestinians were finding it harder and harder to mount operations in the spring of 1973.

      On 15 March, French and Italian authorities arrested two Palestinians who planned to attack the Israeli and Jordanian embassies in Paris. On 4 April, Italian police arrested two more Palestinians, forestalling an attack on El Al passengers at the Leonardo Da Vinci Airport in Rome. Five days later, authorities in Cyprus arrested four Palestinians before they could mount simultaneous attacks on an Israeli Arika passenger jet and the Israeli ambassador's residence in Nicosia. The Mossad and Sayaret Matkal executed Operation Youth of Spring in the heart of Beirut the next night. Seventeen days later the Palestinians tried to retaliate. On 27 April, security officials at Beirut's international airport apprehended three more Palestinians who tried to board a plane for France with explosives. That same day a Palestinian opened fire at the El Al office in Rome, this time managing to kill an Italian clerk who had crossed the path of Palestinian terror. It was a succession of Palestinian failures punctuated by Israeli successes. In June, the Mossad struck in Paris again. This time it was a preemptive strike rather than a reprisal killing.

      A Dirty War

      The PFLP had not conducted a major international terror operation since May 1972, when Wadi Haddad sent the Japanese Red Army mercenaries on a suicide mission to slaughter disembarking passengers at the Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod. By 1973, tensions between George Habash, the PFLP's nominal secretary general, and Haddad, the master of PFLP terror, had begun to divide the PFLP into factions. The devastating attack on the PFLP training camps in Tripoli in February disrupted Haddad's operations. But the master had not laid down the gun. In mid-1973, Haddad was carefully expanding the PFLP terror network in Europe from safe houses in Paris and London. The man at the center of the network was Mohammed Boudia. As chief of PFLP operations in Europe, Boudia had a range of responsibilities that included the recruitment of foreign nationals to the Palestinian cause in the name of world revolution. Among his recruits was Illich Ramírez Sánchez, a megalomaniac young Venezuelan known as Carlos the Jackal, who throughout much of 1974 and 1975 would be one of the world's most hunted terrorists. The Israelis discovered Boudia's activities in Paris. Late in the morning of 28 June, Mossad planted a bomb beneath the seat of Boudia's car; the pressure of his weight detonated it, killing him.¹⁵ The assassination of Mohammed Boudia was the ninth assassination sanctioned by Committee X and the last successful killing in a series of Wrath of God killings. But it was not the last attempt on the life of a Palestinian terrorist. A month later, the Mossad struck again, this time with disastrous consequences. But first Wadi Haddad's faction of the PFLP suddenly went back into action.

      On 20 July, five terrorists hijacked a Japanese Airways flight out of Amsterdam en route to Tokyo with 145 passengers and crew. The hijacking was a combined PFLP and JRA operation. JRA terrorists proved useful to Wadi Haddad at Lod in 1972, but this time the master ordered PFLP members to accompany the Japanese. The operation was a fiasco. One of the hijackers, a Palestinian woman, inadvertently exploded a grenade, killing herself and severely wounding a member of the crew.¹⁶ Miraculously, the Boeing 747 remained airworthy and the terrorists ordered the plane to fly to the Persian Gulf in search of a country that would permit the plane to land. Iraqi authorities denied permission to land at Basra, and Bahraini authorities refused to allow the plane to touch down in Manama before the United Arab Emirates decided to try to resolve the crisis in Dubai. The UAE defense minister took personal charge of the negotiations and boarded the plane after the wounded crew member and the body of the dead terrorist came off it. But the incident did not end in Dubai. The terrorists ordered the plane on to Benghazi, Libya, without issuing a single demand in Dubai. Safe in Muammar Qaddafi's territory, the terrorists released the hostages without gaining anything in return, and then destroyed the huge jet on the ground before surrendering to Libyan authorities. It was an absolutely futile operation that only succeeded in widening the rift between George Habash, the PFLP general-secretary, who denied PFLP involvement in the operation, and Wadi Haddad, the master terrorist, who ordered it.

      A month later, the Mossad carried out another Wrath of God killing, this time in Lillehammer, Norway. Mossad had managed to kill nine Palestinians belonging to the PFLP or Black September. None were of the highest echelon of the terror hierarchy. Black September's Mohammad Najjar and the PFLP's Mohammed Boudia were operational commanders, but not masterminds like Abu Iyad or Wadi Haddad. There was one man among the many marked for assassination whose death the Mossad's assassination squads coveted most, the elusive Ali Hassan Salameh. The Mossad attributed Munich to the Red Prince, although Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud planned the operation, selected the men who carried it out, and transported the weapons that killed the Israelis. But Salameh, who ran operations in Europe and organized Black September's early sabotage operations there, provided logistical support. The intensity of the Mossad's passion to kill him burned for years—even after Golda Meier called off Operation Wrath of God because of the operational errors the Mossad was about to commit in Lillehammer—and may have been due to Salameh's personal relationship to Yasser Arafat.¹⁷ The legend of the Red Prince may be larger than the life.

      In July, the Mossad tracked a man it was certain was the Red Prince to Lillehammer. But the intelligence that led Mossad to the small Norwegian city was false; in fact, Salameh, whose survival depended on counterintelligence, may have provided the Israelis the false intelligence to expose Operation Wrath of God. But in July 1973, Mossad chieftain Zvi Zamir, who personally observed the slaughter of the Israeli Olympians at Fürstenfeldbruck, was so certain of the information that he sanctioned the action in Lillehammer.¹⁸ Mike Harari commanded the seven Mossad agents in the operation. The assassination squad acquired cars and lodging and tracked the movements of a man resembling Salameh for a full day before killing him. In what turned out to be a calamitous error, Harari dismissed one agent's doubts about the identity of the man living modestly in Lillehammer. On the night of 21 August, Ahmed Bouchiki and his wife stepped off a bus and were walking down a darkened Lillehammer street when the madness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict violently collided with their lives. Bouchiki was not a clandestine Palestinian agent, he was a Moroccan waiter whose great misfortune was to bear a striking resemblance to the darkly handsome Salameh. Two Mossad agents fired fourteen shots into Bouchiki and left him to die in front of his wife, Torill Larsen, who was pregnant with their child.

      The Mossad had murdered an innocent man. Zvi Zamir, the Mossad chief, rationalized the mistake, “this may happen in this sort of activity.”¹⁹ But this was only one of many of the assassination squad's operational errors. The day after the murder, Lillehammer police arrested two members of the squad at the airport as they attempted to flee the country. On the night of the murder an alert policeman had taken down the license number of the assassins' car as it sped from the scene; the Mossad agents had failed to exchange cars before fleeing Lillehammer. During the interrogations the Israelis gave up critical information about the operation that led to the arrest of four more members of the assassination squad and compromised Mossad operations in Europe. The damage to Israeli intelligence operations was tremendous. In secret proceedings, a Norwegian court convicted six Israeli intelligence agents for the murder of Ahmed Bouchiki and sentenced them to various prison terms, none longer than twenty-one months.

      The murder of Ahmed Bouchiki remained shrouded in official secrecy for more than a quarter of a century. The principal facts were known, but the sealed court records and the lenient sentences of the six Mossad agents raised suspicions about the involvement of Norwegian security officials. Then came another clandestine encounter between Palestinians and Israelis in Norway. In 1993, twenty years after Bouchiki's murder, PLO and Israeli representatives met secretly in Oslo to work out the details of an agreement that would lead to mutual recognition between Arafat's liberation organization and the Jewish state. Three years later, the Israeli government secretly paid compensation to Torill Larsen, Bouchiki's widow. Israel did not publicly acknowledge complicity in the СКАЧАТЬ