Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (19 page)

28
                  
BOUDIA

PARIS, LATIN QUARTER,
RUE DES FOSSÉS SAINT-BERNARD THURSDAY, JUNE 28, 1973, 1100H

Muhammad Boudia was a terrorism entrepreneur, a true professional in his trade, willing to contract his services to multiple Palestinian terror organizations. Throughout the summer of 1972, Boudia lived in Paris, in constant fear that he was next on the Mossad’s hit list. He was right.

Boudia changed his daily routine regularly and took safety precautions. As the manager of a small theater, he was skilled in the arts of makeup and costume. The attractive thirty-six-year-old Algerian would spend the night with a woman and then leave her apartment in the morning dressed as an old man or a woman, in an attempt to shake any surveillance team that might be following him. Boudia did in fact evade the Caesarea surveillance units on numerous occasions, slipping into the Parisian crowds and disappearing. But every man has a weak point that will ultimately give him away. In Mossad terminology, this is referred to as the “Capture Point.” Muhammad Boudia’s Capture Point was his car. The elusive, wary terrorist inexplicably always drove the same gray Renault 16 with Parisian license plates, registered in his name. This habit was a colossal security oversight that Caesarea would exploit.

Boudia always inspected his Renault before entering. He checked the chassis for explosive devices and hand grenades before unlocking the car. Caesarea’s agents took note. On the night of Thursday, June
28, 1973,
while he slept at the flat of one of his girlfriends, they broke into Boudia’s Renault, placing a lethal explosive device beneath the driver’s seat. The Renault was parked on Rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard next to the Faculty of Sciences building in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Late the next morning, Boudia returned to the car. An eyewitness described the event: “A man in a gray suit arrived and got into the car. He started the engine. His feet were still on the pavement and he was immediately swallowed by a ball of fire.” An undercover Caesarea combatant detonated the bomb by remote control, after verifying that there were no innocent bystanders and that the man who got into the car was, in fact, the target, Muhammad Boudia. Within minutes of the explosion the police and fire departments arrived on the scene. Firemen extinguished the blaze engulfing the car and collected Boudia’s remains—the force of the blast splattered his body parts over the cars parked nearby. “The explosive device was large but the blast was concentrated in the center of the car, preventing pedestrians from being injured,” determined the investigating police officer. The victim was quickly identified. “We knew the man well. He’s been on file,” the investigating officer commented dryly.

Boudia was a left-wing intellectual and an amateur actor. He fought with the underground National Front for the Liberation of Algeria (FLN in its French acronym) against the French occupation in Algeria. The demolition expert’s role in subversive terror attacks on French soil aimed at the oil reserves earned him about three years in a French jail. When Algeria gained independence in 1962, he was released. He returned to Algeria, to live in the capital city of Algiers, and was appointed manager of the national theater by the first Algerian president, Ahmed Ben Bella, his close friend. Three years later, Houari Boumédienne, the opposition leader, rose to power in Algeria. Boudia fled, settling in France. In Paris, he continued to work in his primary field of interest—theater. He was appointed manager of the small avant-garde Théâtre de l’Ouest (Theater of the West). The energetic artist worked long hours, but still managed to find time during his short life to party, to marry and to divorce three times, and to conduct endless love affairs.

Women loved him. That was evident during Eveline Barge’s testimony at her trial in the military court in Lod, Israel, in the summer of 1971. She had been recruited by Boudia, and her testimony provided a keyhole view into his scandalous world. Barge, twenty-six, an English teacher by trade, was a stunning Frenchwoman who started working as a part-time cashier at the theater and promptly became Boudia’s mistress. During her defense she told the judges that she had fallen for his charisma and charm, had internalized and adopted his leftist political beliefs, and was sent by him to carry out a terror attack in Tel Aviv. In her testimony, she also confessed to having assisted in the detonation of a Gulf Oil facility in the Netherlands port of Rotterdam in the spring of 1971.

It was becoming clear to Mossad agents that Boudia was a wizard at recruiting people for his deadly plots. Most were women: Eveline Barge, sentenced to fourteen years in prison, motivated by love; Nadia and Marlene Bradley, daughters of a Moroccan businessman, sent to Israel at his behest with fake passports and powerful explosives, motivated by a thirst for adventure and the forbidden; Pierre and Edith Borghalter, an elderly French couple, motivated, perhaps, by the
3,500
francs they received in exchange for their services. Boudia sent Barge, the Bradley sisters, and the elderly couple to Israel as part of his grandiose plan to orchestrate coordinated explosions in nine Tel Aviv hotels over the Passover holiday. They were intercepted and arrested by Shabak. Had it been successful, the attack would have killed many innocent tourists and Israelis.

Boudia collaborated with the PFLP in the planning of the foiled Passover attack. Two operations against oil facilities, the one in Rotterdam in the middle of March 1971, and the other, in Trieste, Italy, at the start of August 1972, were designed and executed by Boudia and his new close friend Ali Hassan Salameh.

Firemen in Trieste prevented a major disaster by extinguishing the fire before it could ignite an outsized fuel tank. Black September took responsibility for the attack, publishing a formal announcement in Beirut. During the Italian police’s investigation, Boudia’s name came up. Based on the testimonies of detainees suspected of involvement, the police issued a warrant for his arrest in 1973. (After his death, it surfaced that Boudia was wanted for questioning by Interpol, as well as the Swiss and Dutch police.)

The Mossad realized that the connection between Boudia and Salameh was growing stronger, that Boudia, who often worked for the PFLP, wholeheartedly extended his services to Salameh and Fatah. There is no doubt that the cooperation between Boudia and Fatah, operating under the name Black September, was first and foremost the result of the special personal connection he forged with Salameh. The two had met in Europe, loved the good life, and became fast friends. Their friendship ripened, leading to the terror attacks carried out in Europe. Ali Hassan Salameh supplied the logistical services and infrastructure for the attacks; Boudia executed the missions. The Mossad received a steady flow of information indicating that Boudia and Salameh were plotting a high-profile terror attack against Israeli targets in Europe.

Muhammad Boudia was not remotely involved in the Munich Massacre. The Mossad did not try to make a false connection this time. Boudia’s dark past—the thwarted attack in Israel, the successful attacks carried out in Rotterdam and Trieste, and the near-certainty about future terror plans were sufficiently incriminating. The French investigating officer assigned to the assassination announced in front of a French reporter, “He was an active terrorist who was wanted for his role in the explosion of the oil terminal in Trieste, Italy.”

On Sunday, July
1, 1973,
R., Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, arrived very early at his cramped office in the Hadar Dafna Building in Tel Aviv. He went straight to the locked cabinet, turned the key, and drew a large black X over the photo of Boudia’s face. The target of Caesarea’s assassination operations had been executed.

Caesarea’s combatants and staff officers at Tel Aviv headquarters earned many pats on the back. “You do holy work,” they heard often. Harari’s combatants called him Caesar behind his back. He was flattered; he knew that his people would follow him through hell and high water. But their success was going to their heads, a dangerous overconfidence that would lead to tragedy.

In the Mossad’s weekly meeting of division and unit commander heads, Zvi Zamir praised Harari, in front of the full forum, on the smooth and perfect operation that had left no Israeli traces in the field. Harari just sat in his seat and smiled. He and his group’s endless investment were yielding results that far surpassed expectations. Harari did not pause for a second. His men continued to follow his lead and search for trails leading to the next man on the assassination list. Time was not on their side—every passing day gave the enemy the opportunity to devise new plans that the Israelis would have to thwart. On the Mossad’s hit list, one name stood out among the top five. Ali Hassan Salameh.

29
                  
THE BLUNDER IN LILLEHAMMER

LILLEHAMMER, NORWAY
SATURDAY, JULY 21, 1973, 1100H

At the municipal pool in Lillehammer, a peaceful vacation town in Norway, children were splashing and making noise in the heated water while a dozen adult swimmers did their laps up and down the length of the pool, maintaining a steady pace. A young, Middle Eastern–looking man in his thirties stood in the shallow water talking with a bearded European man of similar age. The two did not notice when Marianne Gladnikoff entered the water in her no-frills one-piece blue bathing suit and started to swim. Gladnikoff maneuvered herself closer to the two men as she swam, glancing at the dark man’s face. Each time she swam past, she had a few seconds to examine him. She noticed that the two were speaking in French but the children’s noise prevented her from making out their words. Marianne was the youngest member of the Caesarea surveillance team that was rushed to Lillehammer, one hundred miles north of Oslo, Norway’s capital, to close in on the “bastard,” whose extensive travels had brought him to the sleepy town.

The man with the Middle Eastern appearance was thought to be Ali Hassan Salameh, head of Fatah’s Force 17 and a member of Arafat’s inner circle. According to Israeli intelligence, he was one of the leaders of Black September and had been involved in the planning of the attack at the Munich Olympics. Mike Harari and his officers assumed that Salameh was using the pool as a safe meeting point, where conversation would be inconspicuous and could not be overheard. The European man, they figured, was most likely a
saya’an
involved in an operational plan to carry out another major terror attack against Israeli targets, this time in Scandinavia.

After weeks and months, thousands of hours of reconnaissance, frustrating waiting and watching, Salameh’s trail had finally been picked up by Caesarea’s assassination squad. In a few hours they would be sending him into the next world. The operational and intelligence achievement this assassination represented would be immense, more significant even than the Spring of Youth. Some whispered that success in Lillehammer would take Mike Harari, the rising star, a significant step closer to the Mossad’s top spot.

The hunt for Salameh had stretched across Western Europe since the Munich Massacre. In the summer of 1973, Israeli intelligence received information that he was near the city of Ulm, in West Germany; then they got word that he had moved to Lille, in France; then back to West Germany. Next, he went north to Hamburg, on the shores of the Elbe River, where the trail went cold.

At the same time, Mossad HQ received very general intelligence regarding Fatah’s intention to perpetrate a terrorist attack against Israeli targets in Scandinavia, most likely at the Israeli embassy in Sweden. This intelligence flowed in just as Salameh headed north to Hamburg. With all clues pointing north, intelligence shifted its focus to Stockholm, Sweden’s capital.

On July
14, 1973,
Israeli intelligence learned that a mysterious young Algerian living in Geneva, Switzerland, flew to Copenhagen, Denmark, on short notice. The Mossad suspected the man, Kamal Benaman, of serving as a European liaison for Black September. Benaman, twenty-eight, a dark, handsome Algerian, had left Geneva for a meeting with the boss, Ali Hassan Salameh. According to Mossad HQ estimates, Salameh was to meet with Benaman to finalize the details of Black September’s terror operation in Scandinavia, one that Salameh would command. Benaman was spotted at the Copenhagen airport as he boarded an Oslo-bound plane. Then he disappeared.

A large Mossad team, totaling about a dozen men and women, was hastily organized and flown to Oslo. Their mission was to locate the two men who were set to rendezvous—Benaman and Salameh. On July 18, after an exhaustive four-day hunt, the trackers learned that Benaman had already left Oslo for the northern town of Lillehammer. The surveillance crew, led by staff officer Avraham Gemer, followed him. Despite the unforeseen location, the Mossad’s estimate remained the same—Benaman and Salameh would still meet, most likely in Lillehammer.

Israeli intelligence gathering was incessant and earnest, but the intelligence itself was often of medium to poor quality and incomplete. Low-level sources supplied secondhand information. The Tzomet division, charged with running agents, was still struggling to gain adequate intelligence. A year had passed since Sabena, Munich was ten months old, and when it came to the key players Tzomet was still searching in the dark. Numerous case officers, scattered throughout Europe, invested endless hours recruiting quality sources. Despite their hard work and complete motivation, Tzomet was not getting enough reliable information from its agents. It received virtually no solid intelligence about planned terror attacks and far too little information of the sort that could help in the planning of assassination operations.

For twenty-four hours, the Mossad team could find no trace of Salameh in Lillehammer. Surveillance crews in four cars circled the city, searching the streets, coffee shops, and hotel lobbies, to no avail. On Friday afternoon, July 20, Benaman, who was being trailed at all times, sat on the balcony of the Karoline Café, near Lillehammer Town Hall. Two Middle Eastern–looking men approached him and sat down at his table. The three talked for about an hour. To a member of the surveillance team, one of the men looked like Ali Hassan Salameh.

Harari and Avraham Gemer were jubilant. “We got him!” The suspect left the café on a bicycle a short while later. The surveillance crews zeroed in.

By the next day, Harari and Gemer were increasingly certain of the terrorist’s identity. As they set about sculpting an operational plan for his assassination, Marianne Gladnikoff was sent into the waters of the municipal pool while the surveillance crews waited outside.

Ali Hassan Salameh was a central target for intelligence collection; any agent working for the Mossad was asked and pressured for information about the elusive terrorist. But despite his high profile, operative intelligence regarding Salameh was scant, incomplete, secondhand, and in many cases arrived only after the fact: “Salameh was here . . .” or “Salameh visited there . . .” were phrases Mossad
katsa
s heard all too often. The decision to crown the man in the café as Ali Hassan Salameh was made on the basis of very slim intelligence. The available information was certainly insufficient to authorize an assassination. But all this can only be said in retrospect. At the time, the field operatives were certain that Ali Hassan Salameh had met with Kamal Benaman at the Karoline Café. They had tracked the mysterious Benaman from Geneva to the remote town of Lillehammer. The same man who met with Benaman spoke French at his next meeting in the municipal pool—a language the Mossad believed Salameh spoke well. And when the man in Lillehammer was matched up with a picture of Salameh, the final piece of the puzzle snapped into place: the images bore a remarkable resemblance.

The surveillance squads followed Salameh as he left the municipal pool and entered Bragsang, a store with a coffee shop. At noon, he exited the shop accompanied by a young Norwegian-looking woman. She had light blond hair and was clearly pregnant. The two got on a local bus, a surveillance car following. The couple got off at the bus stop in Nivo, a residential neighborhood in the western part of town, and stepped into one of the new apartment buildings at Rugdeveien 2A. The commander of the mission, Avraham Gemer, instructed his team to station four cars and five surveillance posts around the building, to cover all exit and entry points. Gemer did not intend to let the prey escape this time. The surveillance team took walkietalkies, were told to stay alert and to blend in with their surroundings.

Meanwhile, two undercover combatants arrived separately at the Opland Turis Hotel in the town. The assassins waited for a call from Harari. The Mossad combatants were dark-skinned, had black hair, and drove rental cars with Oslo plates. An anomalous sight in this sleepy town, they attracted attention.

In the evening hours, the man fingered as Salameh and his pregnant partner left the apartment for the local movie theater.

The Israeli surveillance crew had no trouble following; the woman wore a bright yellow raincoat. The couple did not act tense or anxious. They did not try to shake the surveillance. They went straight to the box office in Lillehammer’s only movie theater and bought a pair of tickets for
Where Eagles Dare,
an American war movie starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. It chronicled a group of American soldiers on a suicide mission at the end of World War II. An excited and keyed-up member of the surveillance squad called the rest of the crew, who were in the middle of dinner, to tell them to get ready. The squad spread out to their designated spots, coiled and waiting.

No one on the surveillance squad questioned certain incongruities. Why was Ali Hassan Salameh, the notorious Palestinian terrorist, who was known to be living in Beirut, riding a bicycle in remote Lillehammer, Norway—population: twenty thousand? Why was he so familiar with the streets? Why did he take a pregnant blond Norwegian to the movies? Salameh, despite his reputation at the Mossad and Israeli intelligence as a serial playboy, was married and had two young sons. It required a giant leap to assume that Salameh was leading a double life with a pregnant Norwegian. No one was sent to check his apartment, to look for drafts of terrorist plots. Harari and his agents believed that they had found their man, even if it required a pernicious suspension of logic and several cut corners.

Zvi Zamir was on his way to Lillehammer, flying on a fake passport, undercover. As in previous assassination operations, he asked to be near the operation and to authorize it from up close. But by late evening he was stuck at Schiphol Airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Oslo.

“Is this our man?” Zamir asked, after the operators connected him.

“Yes,” Harari answered.

“Are you sure?” added Zamir.

“Yes,” responded Harari.

“Okay, you have my authorization.”

That was the second conversation between Harari and Zamir that day. The first time they spoke, Zamir requested that Harari verify, as he would again, that they had found the man they sought.

At 2235 hours the couple left the movie theater and walked in silence to the bus stop. Harari sent the two assassins to Porobakakan Street, where they waited in darkness next to one of the houses. The bus arrived at the stop and the couple boarded without hesitation. The surveillance team followed. The couple got off the bus, calm and relaxed. They held hands, talking quietly to each other as they strolled along Porobakakan Street, walking leisurely up the inclining street toward their house. A car coming in the opposite direction stopped several yards away. The two men in the backseat jumped out, withdrew their silenced Berettas, and shot the man ten times at close range. They stepped back into the car and sped off down the hill.

The bullets had torn through the man’s vital organs. The woman knelt down next to him, screaming wildly. A neighbor, a young nurse named Dagny Bring, looked out of her window and called the police. Within three minutes, a police car arrived. Ten minutes later, an ambulance arrived; attempts at resuscitation failed. Fifteen minutes after arriving at the local hospital, the man was pronounced dead.

According to the original plan, Harari and the two assassins were to leave Lillehammer separately, then travel south to Oslo as fast as possible; by the early morning hours they would be scattered in different countries throughout Europe. The members of the surveillance team also headed for Oslo. There, they were supposed to return the rental cars, turn over the keys to the rented apartments they had used during the operation, and sweep, making sure that no “tails” or footprints had been left behind. They were to wait a few days and then get out of Oslo.

Early in the morning, R., Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, called his colleague in Branch 4, a talented young captain from the Targets section, and revealed, “We took him out. We got Salameh, in Norway.”

“What? That’s impossible!”

“I’m telling you, we got him,” R. insisted.

“But it can’t be,” the officer shouted, slamming his fist down hard on the desk. “He wasn’t there. It’s a mistake!”

When the head of Branch 4 debriefed his officers about the amazing assassination in Norway, the officers, appalled, said, “It can’t be, he wasn’t there.”

In Monday’s Norwegian newspapers, giant headlines announced the murder of a young Moroccan by the name of Achmed Bouchiki, killed in Lillehammer on Saturday night. Caesarea officers suspected that the name was just another one of the cover identities Ali Hassan Salameh used while traveling abroad. But they were terribly wrong; they had made an awful mistake. Caesarea’s assassination team had trailed and murdered the wrong man.

A reporter and photographer had rushed to the scene right after the murder. Interviews with eyewitnesses and neighbors revealed the presence of strangers in fancy cars, Mercedes and Mazdas, driving around the neighborhood, pausing in front of the apartment building earlier that day. The reporter knew he had a major story: this was the first murder in Lillehammer in forty years. He had no idea what he really had.

The reporter knew Bouchiki from around town. In a two-page article he described the man as a thirty-year-old Moroccan who had lived in Lillehammer for the past four years. His wife, Toril Larsen Bouchiki, was Norwegian. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy. Bouchiki, the article noted, had emigrated from Morocco in the hope of improving his life. He worked as a waiter, and supplemented his salary with a part-time job at the local pool. Years later it became clear that the meeting with Kamal Benaman on the balcony of the Karoline Café was an innocent get-together between two North Africans, a chance to speak a few words of Arabic and catch up on news from home.