Spies Against Armageddon (57 page)

“The Palestinians were in a state of shock,” David Kimche said when interviewed by one of the authors in September 2007. He also told of his Khartoum trip in the summer of 1967. Kimche died in 2010.

Harmelin (Shin Bet) and Yariv (Aman) spreading rumors of how tough the Israeli hard line would be: recounted by longtime Israeli officer Shlomo Gazit,
The Stick and the Carrot: The Israeli Administration in Judea and Samaria
(in Hebrew from Zmora Bitan, 1985), pp. 133, 223, 284.

Shin Bet agents spread across the West Bank and Gaza often gave advance information of attacks, according to a CIA report on the Israeli intelligence community discovered in the United States embassy in Tehran and published by the Iranian militants who took the diplomats hostages there in 1979. See Melman,
The CIA Report on the Intelligence Services of Israel
, p. 93.

Most Palestinians preferred peace, quiet, and prosperity, and not armed uprisings, according to Yaari,
Fatah
, pp. 91-103.

Harmelin did not believe in physically abusive interrogations, according to the Israeli newspaper
Hadashot
, November 6, 1987.

Chapter 10

Zvi Zamir was a colorless general who became Mossad director in 1968. He is profiled by Eitan Haber and Ze’ev Schiff in
Israel, Army and Defense
, p. 195.

The revelation that Yosef Harmelin only reluctantly fired a Shin Bet department chief because of the Munich Olympics massacre was in the Hebrew newspaper
Hadashot
, November 6, 1987.

Zadok Ofir, the Israeli intelligence case officer who was shot in Brussels by a PLO man he was trying to recruit, told his story to one of the authors, in Tel Aviv, in December 2007.

Former Mossad director Zamir himself informed the authors that there was no formal Committee X to decide on life or death for individual terrorists. He also lambasted Steven Spielberg’s movie,
Munich
, which was based on a best selling book by Canadian journalist George Jonas,
Vengeance
(British edition published by Collins, 1984; American re-release by Simon and Schuster, 2005). Jonas based his book on conversations and travels with an Israeli, “Avner,” who claimed to have led a Mossad assassination squad. Several published reports say that man is a New York-based security consultant, Juval Aviv. Zamir was among those who said that the story’s details were entirely invented and that Aviv was not part of a Mossad hit team.

Another book on the killings of Palestinian terrorists in Europe by the Mossad, after the Munich Olympics massacre, is by David B. Tinnin with Dag Christensen,
The Hit Team
(British edition by Futura Books, 1977).

“What can I say, that it consoled me?” Shin Bet man Baruch Cohen’s widow Nurit was quoted in the Hebrew magazine,
Monitin
, in February 1988.

Ali Hassan Salameh is described as “Arafat’s young protégé” in Simon Reeve,
One Day in September: The Full Story of the Munich Olympics Massacre
(Skyhorse Publishing, 2011), which is one of several books reporting that the CIA paid for Salameh’s trip to Hawaii and Florida in 1977. Salameh is also said to have briefed officers at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. See also Michael Bar-Zohar and Eitan Haber,
The Quest for the Red Prince: Israel’s Relentless Manhunt for One of the World’s Deadliest and Most Wanted Arab Terrorists
(Lyons Press, 2002).

David Ignatius, then with
The
Wall Street Journal
, in February 1983 broke the news that Salameh had been the liaison between the PLO and the CIA. Ignatius reported that Salameh kept rejecting offers of payments from the Agency. In his regular column in
The Washington Post
on November 12, 2004, Ignatius wrote: “I’m told that it was blessed, from the beginning, by Arafat, who wanted to open a channel to the Americans.” Ignatius added: “Arafat remained a believer in the secret power of the CIA; that was one of his many mistakes.” A thinly veiled account of the CIA-PLO connection is in the first novel by Ignatius,
Agents of Innocence
(W.W. Norton, 1987).

Uri Dan, the late Israeli journalist, profiled Sylvia Raphael when writing in
The New York Post
, February 19, 2005, about her death from cancer in South Africa at age 67.

Her story is also recounted in Hebrew by former Mossad operative Gad Shimron in
The Mossad and Its Myth
(Keter Publishing, 2011), pp. 175-7.

Eliezer Palmor, then Israel’s ambassador to Norway, told of his daughter’s discovery of Raphael’s romance with her defense lawyer, in a conversation with one of the authors in December 2011.

A BBC Panorama documentary in January 2006 stated that when Black September leader Ali Hassan Salameh was assassinated in Beirut, Erika Chambers herself pressed the transmitter button that detonated the car bomb.

A German journalist who wrote about Chambers is Wilhelm Dietl, who himself was a covert case officer for his country’s BND for 11 years. Dietl wrote a memoir and was interviewed by one of the authors: see Yossi Melman, “Cover Story,” in
Ha’aretz
, June 14, 2007.

Erika Chambers’s father, a well known race car driver for MG in Britain, wrote two memoirs: Marcus Chambers,
Works Wonders: Competition Manager Recalls an Historic Era of Motorsport
(Motor Racing Publications Ltd, 1995); and
With a Little Bit of Luck!
(Mercian Manuals Ltd, 2008). They make no mention of his daughter who vanished. He died at age 98 in 2009.

In discussing “Avner,” the main source for the book
Vengeance
and Steven Spielberg’s movie
Munich
, Zamir called him an imposter in an interview by one of the authors on February 17, 2005.

There was a further absurdity after the incident in Rome in 1973 in which the Egyptian, Ashraf Marwan—secretly working for the Mossad—set up the arrest of Palestinian terrorists with missiles. Twenty years later, an Italian investigative magistrate issued an official charge that Zamir and the Mossad were responsible for the destruction of an Italian military plane—a kind of revenge, as the judge saw it, for Italy’s release of the Palestinians with their rockets. Zamir and the Israeli government strongly denied the charge, arguing that Israel does not down the airplanes of friendly countries.

Chapter 11

Meir Amit, former Mossad director, spoke with one of the authors in August 2007.

“The two Israelis were lucky that the host country suspected nothing.” The scientist who in 1988 told one of the authors about supplying photocopies to Lakam asked for anonymity.

More information on arms smuggling to newborn Israel, with cooperation from Jewish and Gentile criminals in America, is in Raviv and Melman,
Friends In Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance
, pp. 36-46.

Eliyahu Sakharov, the furniture manufacturer who smuggled nuclear materials for Israel, described his experiences in letters to old friends and government officials. He published some of the details in a book in Hebrew,
Ma’as Ba-Tzel
(meaning
Deed in the Shadow
; Ministry of Defense Publishing, 2000), translated into English as
Memoirs
. The book had many deletions ordered by Israel’s military censor, and the ministry’s security officers vetted the manuscript attentively.

Avraham Hermoni of Lakam was in diplomatic lists as scientific counselor in the Israeli embassy in Washington from 1968 to 1972, according to Charles Babcock, “U.S. an Intelligence Target of the Israelis, Officials Say,”
The Washington Post
, June 5, 1986.

The issue of what Carl Duckett of the CIA told members of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission—and what Edward Teller told Duckett—is discussed by Avner Cohen in
Israel and the Bomb
, pp. 297-8, and footnotes on pp. 421-2.

Victor Gilinsky, former NRC member, gave his understanding of Duckett’s message in 1976—including the references to Numec—in a letter to
The New York Review of Books
, May 13, 2004.

Ken Follett’s
Triple
(Signet, 1980) is a novel clearly inspired by Israel’s clever acquisition of 200 tons of yellowcake uranium by means of a ship-to-ship transfer. Investigative journalists with Britain’s
Sunday Times
wrote an excellent non-fiction account: Elaine Davenport, Paul Eddy, and Peter Gillman,
The Plumbat Affair
(A. Deutsch, 1978). But the role played by Blumberg, Sakharov, and Lakam was unknown until now.

On Alfred Frauenknecht visiting Israel, viewing the Kfir’s inaugural flight, but feeling abandoned, see Steven,
Spymasters
, pp. 210-220; and Eisenberg, Dan, and Landau,
The Mossad
, pp. 177-198, 212-227.

For more about Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and his secret work with Lakam’s Binyamin Blumberg, see Yossi Melman, “Discreet”, in
Ha’aretz
, April 23, 2005.

An almost complete account of Milchan’s parallel, clandestine career is in Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman,
Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan
(Gefen Books, 2011). On p. 268, the book reveals the role played by Milchan in obtaining blueprints for centrifuges from Urenco. After their initial manuscript was complete, Milchan partially cooperated with Doron and Gelman.

The use of older centrifuges inside the Dimona complex to test the effectiveness of a computer worm to be injected into Iran’s nuclear centrifuge system was revealed by “Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay,”
The New York Times
, January 15, 2011.

The statement that just before the war of June 1967, Israel would only have to “connect a few wires” to have an operational atomic bomb, is in oral testimony by retired General Tzvi Tzur, a former IDF chief of staff, who in 1967 was a special assistant to the defense minister in charge of Lakam and the nuclear project. Before his death in 2004, Tzur recorded his memories for the Rabin Center in Tel Aviv. Parts were published in
Ha’aretz
on September 16, 2011.

Lt. Colonel Dov Tamari’s recollection of being ordered to prepare to place Israel’s first atomic bomb atop a mountain in Egypt’s Sinai was in
Ha’aretz
of September 16, 2011.

The assertion that Israel conducted its first nuclear test in September 1979, apparently with South Africa’s cooperation, is based on American officials, as is the description of the Jericho missile—a secret Israeli project based on a French missile—as being capable or designed to carry a nuclear warhead.

Binyamin Blumberg’s post-retirement life in Tel Aviv, under the name Vered, was described by several former intelligence operatives after 2002. His one and only interview was in the Hebrew-language newspaper
Ma’ariv
, April 6, 2012.

A Man Without Qualities
was an unfinished but widely read three-volume novel from the 1930s by Austrian writer Robert Musil.

Chapter 12

Aman is generally overshadowed by the Mossad, and this position is somewhat reminiscent of America’s National Security Agency. With electronic and communications monitoring capabilities far larger than Aman’s, the NSA lives in the shadow of the CIA. But it is the NSA’s eavesdropping and data analysis that lay the groundwork for American intelligence successes. See James Bamford,
The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency
(Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

A longer account of the Egyptian brigadier general, codenamed Koret by the Mossad, who spied for Israel, can be found in David Arbel and Uri Neeman,
Unforgivable Delusion
(in Hebrew, Miskal-Yediot-Chemed Books, 2005), pp. 204-214. Theirs is one of the best books on the intelligence failure in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The authors are former senior Mossad intelligence analysts.

On the Egyptian who worked for the Mossad at the port of Alexandria, and how his “war indicator” was ignored in Tel Aviv, see Yossi Melman, “Regards from Alexandria,”
Ha’aretz
, October 8, 2008.

King Hussein of Jordan’s secret meetings with Israeli leaders are chronicled in Yossi Melman and Dan Raviv,
Behind the Uprising
(Greenwood Press, 1989).

Ashraf Marwan, the high-ranking Egyptian who was close to Presidents Nasser and Sadat, was the Mossad’s best foreign agent. Some in Israeli intelligence still suspect that he ultimately was serving Egypt. See Yossi Melman, “The Truth about Israel’s Egyptian Spy,”
Ha’aretz
, December 17, 2010.

Valuable information about the Egyptian spy can be found in a Hebrew book by Uri Bar-Joseph,
The Angel: Ashraf Marwan, the Mossad, and the Yom Kippur War
(Kinneret-Zmora Bitan-Dvir, 2010).

Questions about what Israeli and U.S. intelligence knew, in the months before the October 1973 war, were discussed in 1998 by a unique panel of Israeli, American, and Arab officials, published as Richard B. Parker (editor),
The October War: A Retrospective
(University of Florida Press, 2001), pp. 130-143.

Golda Meir’s despair during the 1973 war, including thoughts of suicide, were related by her personal secretary and confidante, Lou Kaddar, in the
Davar
newspaper weekly supplement, December 7, 1987.

The creation of the “Devil’s Advocate Department” inside Aman is discussed by its former head, retired Colonel Shmuel Even, in “The Revision Process in Intelligence,” an essay in Amos Gilboa and Ephraim Lapid (eds.),
Israel’s Silent Defender: An Inside Look at Sixty Years of Israeli Intelligence
(Gefen Publishing and the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center, 2012), p. 309.

The rescue of hijacked Air France passengers at Entebbe airport in Uganda by Israeli commandos is recounted in many books, including William Stevenson,
90 Minutes at Entebbe
(Bantam Books, 1976).

Chapter 13

On the frequent declarations by Mossad directors that the peak moments of their careers came when they helped Jews move to Israel: The authors heard these phrases or similar ones from Isser Harel, Meir Amit, Zvi Zamir, Shabtai Shavit, and Efraim Halevy in the various interviews conducted with them since the 1970s.