Spies Against Armageddon (26 page)

Egypt’s intelligence agency agreed to provide Soviet-made SAM-7 Strela missiles to a team of PLO guerrillas, who would fire them. The coordinator of the plot was Ashraf Marwan, a young and ambitious chemist who was a significant character in Cairo for three reasons: His father was a senior Egyptian officer; he himself was the husband of Mona, daughter of the late President Nasser; and he was a close aide to President Sadat.

Two Strela missiles, with their launchers, were packed into boxes bearing Mona’s name, and they were sent from Cairo to Rome as legally unsearchable diplomatic mail. The addressee was an Egyptian arts center in Italy.

Marwan picked up the parcels, wrapped the missiles and launchers in a large carpet, and personally delivered them to the Palestinian terrorists at an elegant shoe store on Via Veneto, near the United States embassy. Marwan then flew to London to await the results.

The plot failed. Italy’s security services and police arrested some of the terrorists and seized their missiles. What the Libyan, Egyptian, and Palestinian conspirators never knew was the secret about Marwan: He was a paid agent for the Mossad, one of the best Israel ever had.

Zamir knew what was happening, every step of the way. He knew about Qaddafi’s drive for revenge, his pressure on Egypt, and Sadat’s approval of a plan to shoot down innocents on an Israeli airliner.

Zamir had flown to Rome, to supervise Mossad operatives who kept the Palestinian plotters under surveillance. Zamir, waiting until he knew that they had the missiles with them, personally informed his Italian counterpart.

Frustration for the Mossad came, however, when the five Palestinians who were arrested—despite being sentenced to long terms by a judge at their trial—were released by Italy after only a few months.

The release was forced upon Italy by a PLO method that became increasingly routine. Palestinians hijacked an Italian civilian airliner, and they refused to release the plane and a large number of hostages until the five prisoners in Rome were set free.

What filmmaker Spielberg and countless publications did not comprehend fully was the logic behind the Mossad’s post-Munich assassinations. European governments were repeatedly giving in to blackmail and releasing Arabs who clearly were guilty of terrorism. Israel wanted its enemies to be neutralized. It would have settled for seeing them jailed for long terms. But because Europe was releasing them, Israel decided that it would have to remove them from the scene.

Finding it impractical to take the extra risks to kidnap and imprison known terrorists in distant lands, the Mossad would kill them.

In addition, there was a desire for psychological impact. Despite the fact that there were barely 10 killings in this campaign, a deterrent effect was surely achieved. Israel was perceived as a country with a very long arm and the memory of an elephant.

More than 30 years later, in light of Hollywood’s distorted take on the post-Munich killings, Zamir felt compelled to clarify the nuanced reasons for the Mossad sending out assassins—even to friendly countries where police and politicians were unhappy about playing host to bloodshed. He insisted that the killings were tactical, part of a war.

Zamir said: “Munich was a shock to all of us, a turning point. Yet, Golda didn’t order us to avenge the slaughter of our athletes, as the world has assumed. Our decision was to disrupt the PLO’s operational infrastructure in Europe: their offices, couriers, representatives, and routes.

“Golda left the decision whom to kill, and where, to us. Our attitude was that in order to defend ourselves, we have to go on the attack. And I believe we succeeded in our campaign. Those who accuse us of being motivated simply by revenge are talking nonsense. We didn’t wage a vendetta campaign against individuals. It was a war against an organization, aiming to halt and prevent concrete terrorist plans.

“Yes, those who were involved in Munich deserved death. But we didn’t deal with the past. We concentrated on what was expected to happen.”

Zamir also refuted the myth of Committee X. “There was no such committee,” he said. “The system worked differently. At headquarters, the heads of the operational and research units collected data on the most active PLO representatives and agents in Europe. Based on that information, a list was compiled, and that was shown to a small group of senior Mossad managers.

“That was the forum that decided whom to kill, and where and when, if operational circumstances allowed that to be carried out.”

The process was far more informal, in a sense more Israeli, than having a stodgy committee labeled X. Zamir did, indeed, go to Prime Minister Meir with the list of recommended targets, and she consulted with a small group of cabinet members: Moshe Dayan, Foreign Minister Abba Eban, Yigal Allon, and Yisrael Galili. Her counterterrorism advisor, Aharon Yariv, was also part of the consultation process—focused on the danger that the intended target might pose if he continued to be alive and active. They also considered what the damage might be to Israel’s relations with the country where the assassination would take place.

Last, but surely not least, the prime minister and her advisors—in a pattern that became a fixture of Israeli behavior—wanted to know about collateral damage. The Israelis believe they are different from, and, indeed, morally superior to, their Middle East counterparts. The Mossad targeted only the suspects and tried to avoid killing innocent people, though occasionally some deaths and injuries did occur.

In the end, it was Golda Meir herself who gave Zamir the final green light for any “elimination mission.” A planned assassination, by the foreign intelligence agency of a modern democratic country, was considered something for which the highest elected authority in the land should take responsibility.

Murdering individuals was and remains a rarely used weapon for Israeli intelligence, but it would continue to be a very important tool: to eliminate the person or persons gunned down or blown up, and to send a message to others who might think of joining or replacing those killed.

Israeli leaders kept their focus on terrorism, probably to an exaggerated degree. They almost ignored the fact that military build-ups by Arab armies would pose much more of a danger than the ambitions of a “Red Prince” Salameh or Arafat.

Chapter Eleven

Forbidden Arms

In the first half of the 1960s, Israel managed to repel pressure from the United States and France to slow down or fully reveal its embryonic nuclear program. Side-stepping pressure from powerful foreigners gave the Israelis who were privy to the secret an energizing sense of confidence. They realized that producing nuclear bombs would be doable. No one would stop Israel.

Yet the project would require raw materials, know-how, and the right technology and equipment.

Entrusted with nurturing, protecting, and zealously hiding a weapon that Israel was intent on developing—but hoped never to use—Binyamin Blumberg continued toiling in anonymity. And he toiled even harder.

His Science Liaison Bureau, Lakam, moved out of the Defense Ministry compound, where it might have been noticed. He opened his office in an ordinary civilian building on Tel Aviv’s Carlebach Street, very close to the large
Ma’ariv
building, but no one at that newspaper seemed to know about him and his unmentionable mission.

Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s desire for a nuclear option, to put tiny Israel in the big league with the United States and other great powers, remained strong in the hearts of top Israeli leaders. Shimon Peres made sure that funding and facilities were always available, as needed; their budgets usually were hidden in those of other defense projects.

Blumberg in 1957 had begun to procure everything Israel needed to build a nuclear bomb, and all through the 1960s he stepped up the effort. He correctly believed that official French assistance could not be counted on forever, and he realized that no open source of help would be found.

President John F. Kennedy, and even his friendly successor, Lyndon Johnson, would never provide supplies for this project. Other Western governments either danced to the American tune or feared the reactions of Arab countries.

Blumberg concluded that Lakam would have to operate outside the borders of Israel, effectively on a worldwide scale, so he knew he would need help from other secret agencies.

First, he would have to make the effort to heal old wounds and rivalries within the Israeli intelligence community.

“I was suspicious of Blumberg and his people,” Meir Amit admitted—unknowingly echoing the words of his own rival, Isser Harel, who a few years earlier held almost identical sentiments about Lakam. Still, a project that the nation’s leaders saw as a high priority demanded the attention of the secret agencies. Although suspicions never fully evaporated, amicable cooperation developed between Lakam and Amit’s Mossad.

Blumberg also managed to overcome a bureaucratic battle with the Foreign Ministry and got authorization to send his own scientific attachés to Israeli embassies abroad. Carefully selected from a pool of engineers, physicists, and chemists with security clearance, many of them had worked at the Israel Atomic Energy Commission or in military-related research. They were ordered to pay close attention to any new scientific development, to buy all the journals and professional publications, and to establish friendly contacts with scientists in their countries of residence.

Lakam officers also mapped the wide terrain of Israeli academia, pinpointing professors and researchers who were heading abroad for exchange programs and major conferences. If they were considered trustworthy, they were approached and were asked to do the government some favors. Very few refused.

The requests were usually tiny, involving technical information from open sources such as magazines. There were, however, cases in which academics were asked to steal scientific materials—including blueprints and studies—from research centers where they were spending sabbaticals.

At times, the scientific attachés at embassies abroad were clearly not professional spy handlers. They were protected, however, by diplomatic immunity, so at least they would not end up in prison.

One senior Israeli scientist, who was studying at a prestigious German institute, secretly photocopied various documents on a regular basis. He brought the copies home, and once a week the science attaché of the Israeli embassy would come to pick them up. The attaché, a Lakam man, displayed an unconscionable lack of responsibility, however. He often arrived late for meetings and sometimes did not show up at all. The two Israelis were lucky that the host country suspected nothing.

It was actually harder for Israelis to commit such deeds in America. From the late 1960s onward, America’s intelligence community kept tabs on nearly every Israeli scientist who visited the United States. The Federal Bureau of Investigation simply assumed that Israel, as a young and ambitious country, was engaged in espionage ceaselessly and everywhere.

Professor Yuval Ne’eman, who had developed a host of useful gadgets and technical systems for Aman and also served as a senior member of the IAEC, saw the suspicion up close in the 1960s after arriving at Caltech in Pasadena for a semester of physics research.

“Professor, I am from the department,” an unfamiliar voice on the telephone announced. “Can we meet?”

Ne’eman assumed that the person speaking was a member of the university faculty. To his consternation, the man who arrived for the appointment introduced himself instead as an investigator for the U.S. Department of Justice. “Are you Colonel Ne’eman?” the American asked.

“Yes,” Ne’eman replied, somewhat surprised to be addressed by his military rank and realizing that the investigator was in fact an FBI special agent. The Israeli explained that he was no longer in his country’s military intelligence; he had left, and now worked at Tel Aviv University.

“But we know that you are still involved in spying,” said the American. “I’d advise you to stop immediately.”

Ne’eman vehemently denied the allegation, and the conversation ended abruptly. This had obviously been an attempt to intimidate him, probably in reaction to a visit Ne’eman had just made to the federal nuclear research center in Livermore, east of San Francisco. Considering what the United States was starting to figure out about Israel’s Dimona facilities, a tour of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seemed important.

A few weeks later, Ne’eman moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where another Justice Department official paid a visit—this time demanding that Ne’eman register as a “foreign agent” of the Israeli government.

Doing so would have harmed Ne’eman’s reputation as a physicist, and his travel would have been restricted by U.S. authorities; but the U.S.-Israel intelligence connection was able to help him. The liaison officer representing Mossad’s Tevel department in Washington lodged a direct appeal with the CIA, which was able to cancel the requirement that the Israeli register as an agent.

These incidents should have alarmed Blumberg and his assistants, yet the Israeli fishing expeditions in America continued. Years later, in the 1980s, such sloppiness would lead to exposure and a life sentence for Jonathan Pollard, an American naval analyst spying for Israel, who was run by Lakam. (
See Chapter 18.
)

The entirely anonymous agency also turned, in the 1960s, to a small but growing network of Israelis who did business overseas. One of the pillars of Lakam’s risky operation was Eliyahu Sakharov, a successful businessman with a strong streak of patriotism.

Born in Jerusalem in 1914 to a wealthy family of Jewish traders, he joined the Haganah during the pre-state years and became a personal assistant to Shaul Avigur, the head of the illegal immigration agency Aliya B.

When Israel declared its independence, Sakharov was sent by the organization to Czechoslovakia to arrange the purchase of German-made warplanes. The sale by a Communist country was approved by Stalin, as a way of helping Israel so that it, too, would become a Soviet satellite.

Sakharov would be dispatched later to the United States to arrange more weapons smuggling from America, Mexico, and Latin American countries—on occasion with the help of gangsters, including notorious Jews such as Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel.

After reaching the rank of lieutenant general in the IDF, Sakharov joined the family business as a leading importer of lumber and timber for the furniture industry. One day in the early 1960s, he was on a flight home from West Germany, on one of his frequent business trips to buy machinery, and was seated next to one of his old friends, Amos Manor.

Sakharov mentioned to the Shin Bet chief that he had just met with German industrialists involved in the chemicals trade. Manor was highly interested and said that he would get in touch with him soon about something.

Instead, it was Binyamin Blumberg who phoned Sakharov a few days later. They met at Blumberg’s office. The security chief asked Sakharov if he would volunteer to approach the German businessmen and try to cajole them into procuring materials that Israel needed for a sensitive and secret project. Sakharov said he would try.

Though offered reimbursement for his expenses, Sakharov declined and paid for his travel and efforts out of his own pocket.

It turned out that the West Germans he would approach were former Nazis. On several occasions and on disparate subjects, Israeli intelligence showed no inhibitions or bad conscience about working with men of such background.

The West Germans had a company, Asmara Chemie, named for the capital of Eritrea, then part of Ethiopia, where one of the partners had gotten his post-war start in business. The company was wheeling and dealing in chemicals, weapons, and most anything it could buy and sell for cash. Its main office was in Wiesbaden, West Germany.

Sakharov’s principal contact there was Herbert Schulzen, a veteran of the Nazi air force who was wounded when he crashed his plane in Denmark. Schulzen was a colorful extrovert, as well as a shrewd businessman, and had close contacts with West Germany’s army and atomic energy commission.

Sakharov made a point of purchasing glues from Asmara for his timber business and then invited Schulzen to Israel. The ex-Luftwaffe officer, still convalescing from his wartime injuries, decided to come—attracted by the prospect of great medical care. He had a lot of time for socializing, too.

Sakharov introduced him to Blumberg and other officials of the defense ministry. The Israelis referred to him as “the Nazi pilot,” and they went out drinking together in Tel Aviv. Schulzen enjoyed the feeling that the Jews did not hate him and in fact needed him. He decided to help them.

An Israeli who was close to the operation, when asked why former Nazis would help a Jewish state, pondered before replying: “Some of them did it out of sympathy for Israel; others, for financial gain. In any case, we knew how to play on their guilt feeling, as Germans, toward us Jews. We took advantage of it.”

The Blumberg-Sakharov project needed calcium, a material used in treating sensitive metals. It is also used on “yellowcake”—uranium hexafluoride—a material necessary for the production of a nuclear bomb. At that time, the appropriate form of calcium was produced by Degussa, a German company that made gold bars and industrial metals. Degussa had profiteered during the war from gold teeth and other metal items stolen from murdered Jews.

Before long, Sakharov was unofficially Lakam’s “case officer,” running a network of agents whom he and Bloomberg dubbed with Biblical code names: Giv’on, Ayalon, Shemesh, and Yare’ach (the latter two being the Hebrew words for sun and moon, alluding to the tale of Joshua stopping the sun over a place called Giv’on and the moon in the valley of Ayalon).

Schulzen’s Asmara served as a front for the purchases by Israel, in exchange for hefty commissions. Shipments of chemicals, metals, and other materials for the Dimona nuclear project began to arrive from Degussa, usually via other European ports, disguised as cargo for Sakharov’s lumber and wood-processing businesses.

Schulzen probably did not know this had anything to do with nuclear weapons, but he had to know he was part of something clandestine and important to the Jewish state.

The acquisition chain almost came to an abrupt end in 1966. A shipment of calcium was loaded in barrels aboard an Israeli vessel named
Tsefat
, owned by Zim—then Israel’s government-run shipping company.

The
Tsefat
sailed from West Germany to Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, to pick up more cargo. While anchored at Europe’s busiest port, a fire broke out aboard the ship. The local Dutch fire department extinguished the blaze by flooding the storage spaces of the
Tsefat
. The contact between water and the calcium caused an effervescent chemical reaction, and the falsely labeled barrels jumped into the air. Television crews and photographers took plenty of pictures of a wondrous scene of smoke, steam, and leaping barrels.

The cargo calmed itself, but the crew of the ship fled, and other ships refused to tie up near the Israeli vessel. Confusion, embarrassment, and attention compounded.

Sakharov flew from Tel Aviv to Rotterdam, via Paris, to see how he could help. While in Paris, he heard from Blumberg that atomic energy experts believed the situation could be dangerous—that perhaps they should advise the mayor of Rotterdam to evacuate residential neighborhoods near the port.

Sakharov refused to follow that advice, deciding that he would do everything he could to save the precious cargo for Israel. After all, a lot of clandestine efforts had been invested in obtaining those chemicals.

When he got to the port, he introduced himself as the cargo owner and insisted that it was not hazardous. He said the contents were needed for special glue for his furniture factory’s planks and boards in Israel, but he declined to identify the precise chemicals. He claimed that the formula was an industrial secret.

Sakharov boarded the
Tsefat
to show that it was not dangerous.

Finally, after he mollified the port officials by paying extra fees, everyone was persuaded to forget about the furor. He managed to summon another Israeli ship to pick up the cargo. Everything was taken away, including empty barrels and some material that spilled into the harbor.

The most important and precious element for Dimona was uranium, the fuel to run the reactor. France did keep its promise to deliver uranium, but when relations became strained Israel’s atomic energy officials feared they would run out of fuel. Blumberg was instructed to find alternative sources.