The new spies, p.22
The New Spies, page 22
With a single imaginative move, a national asset would be created, expensive duplication among intelligence agencies eliminated, timely intelligence be made available and countries such as the US would begin to play on the kind of level playing field the policy makers and intelligence community talk about but do little to achieve.
THE CHALLENGES: TERRORISM
CHAPTER ELEVEN - SUPPING WITH THE DEVIL
Before dawn on September 5, 1972, eight terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine scaled the six-foot high wire fence surrounding the specially constructed village housing the athletes competing in the Munich Olympic Games. Dressed in tracksuits, the men crept through the darkness towards the building housing the Israeli contingent. They burst through the door and found the team gathering in the main room for breakfast. Two of the competitors — wrestling coach Moshe Weinberger and weightlifter Yossef Romano — tried to intervene and were shot dead with two bursts from an AK-47 Kalashnikov automatic rifle.
As was typical in those days, there had been no warning of the attack. The West German and Israeli governments had no effective contingency plans to deal with the crisis. The terrorists demanded the release of 234 prisoners held in Israel and members of the Red Army Faction in jail in Germany. The Germans were prepared to free their prisoners but the Israelis had already adopted a policy of no negotiation with terrorists and refused the demands. Mossad chief Zvi Zamir immediately flew to Munich to try and persuade the West Germans to stand firm, and to allow an Israeli sayeret counter-terrorist squad to plan the assault.
The Germans compromised. They refused to release the terrorists from jail and tried to rescue the hostages themselves. The terrorists were flown by helicopter from Munich to Fürstenfeldbruck military airfield, ostensibly to board a Boeing 727 to Cairo. As the terrorists left the helicopters, snipers on the roof of the airport terminal opened fire on the terrorists, killing two and wounding others. But the assault was a halfhearted effort with two of the snipers losing their nerve and failing to fire. Also, the inexperienced German police had miscalculated the number of snipers required and their effectiveness. (Today, no serious counterterrorist team would rely on snipers alone to kill a number of terrorists simultaneously.)
The remaining terrorists had time to reboard the helicopters and, when the Germans followed up the sniper attack with a direct assault using soldiers and armoured cars, the Palestinians killed five of the bound and gagged hostages in one helicopter and blew it up. As the firefight continued, the second helicopter with another four Israeli hostages on board also exploded. Although five of the terrorists were killed and three arrested, nine Israelis died.[117]
The massacre of the eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics acted as a catalyst for the world’s intelligence community in their efforts to combat terrorism. The attack illustrated the abject failure of the community to act proactively. The military had a relatively simple solution to their part of the problem. The French, the Germans, the British and the Americans all eventually established special counter-terrorist units dedicated exclusively to the rescue of hostages or the elimination of terrorists.
For the intelligence community, countering the terrorist threat was not so easy. More terrorist organizations were springing up every week. Attacks were carried out for a wide variety of reasons, using different methods and often across international borders. With the exception of the efforts of military intelligence to counter the threat of the Warsaw Pact, little attempt had been made by the industrialized nations to share intelligence. On the contrary, after the Second World War, every effort had been made to contain intelligence information within a national border, the natural distrust of one intelligence service for another ensuring that as little as possible was shared to avoid compromising sources and methods.
Now the terrorists were exploiting these precise weaknesses, using all the advantages of the late twentieth century -- excellent land, sea and air communications — to their political and military advantage, while their opponents squabbled among themselves. When the terrorism threat first appeared at the end of the 1960s, it was the Israelis who raised the alarm. They warned that a number of Palestinians, frustrated by years of indifference by the international community, were trying to raise the people, cash and arms to move the struggle away from the conference table and into the streets. Until this time, the intelligence world had focused its attention on the Cold War, with the occasional diversion into insurgency warfare in countries like Yemen and Malaysia, or the overthrow of inconvenient dictators in countries like Iraq and Oman.
From the onset of what appeared to be an international revolution, far broader than the narrow Middle East problems about which the Israelis had been warning, the intelligence community were besieged by their political masters with demands for information. To many it seemed that no modern democracy was to be spared this new scourge, with bombs exploding on the high streets of European capitals, and prominent politicians and businessmen targeted for assassination and kidnap all over the world. The intelligence community had no answers to offer. There were no sources, technical or human, to produce the information on which the analysts could base any recommendations.
The Germans did deals with the Palestinians, the French (as usual) offered money in exchange for peace, while the Americans tried a little of both. This led to some extraordinary compromise deals, the most interesting of which concerned the man who organized the massacre at Munich, Abu Hassan Salameh. Known as the Red Prince, Salameh was in charge of operations for the Black September terrorist group. He was responsible for the planning and logistics of the operation from his base in East Germany.
Salameh made an unlikely terrorist. He was the wealthy son of a Palestinian merchant, Sheik Hassan Salameh, who had been at the forefront of local resistance to the formation of an Israeli state in 1948 until he was blown up by an Israeli car bomb during the Arab-Israeli war of that year, a fate that was later to befall his son. Young Abu Hassan had assumed his father’s mantle even though he had very little in common with poor firebrands like Yasser Arafat, who were at the heart of the growing Palestinian terrorist movement. Educated in Cairo, at Bir Zeit University on the West Bank, and in West Germany where he studied engineering, Salameh developed a Western style that was criticized by his traditional colleagues in the PLO. He enjoyed designer clothes, fast cars and attractive women, and took up karate to help his muscle tone. He was handsome, with sensual good looks, and he enjoyed living the playboy lifestyle with a villa in Geneva and regular trips to the South of France.
He was a dangerous, ruthless and well educated man but he was also a pragmatist like Arafat. When the initial work of Black September had done its job of attracting world attention to the Palestinian cause, Salameh left to head up Force 17, Arafat’s personal bodyguard. He also became point man for Arafat’s delicate relationship with the Americans. For his part, Arafat wanted to convince the Americans at an early stage in their relationship that he was a realist who did not want to see the destruction of Israel, whatever he might say publicly. At the same time, the Americans were desperate for information about the PLO, its leaders, its methods and its objectives.
In 1969 Bob Ames, then the CIA’s man in Beirut, had opened links with Fatah, the wing of the PLO he felt had both staying power and some degree of moderation. He told Salameh he was acting on behalf of President Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger who were anxious to establish a dialogue with the Palestinian movement. Naturally, Salameh and Arafat were enthusiastic about the arrangement, which gave them access and credibility.
Salameh was now in charge of around 6,000 PLO fighters in Lebanon and clearly had a tough grip in a lawless land. His skills as a diplomat and a leader so impressed the Agency that they made him, via a CIA intermediary in Rome, a cash offer of $3 million to work for them. Salameh, comfortable with the role of intermediary but outraged at the idea of betraying his people, turned them down and refused to take Ames’ calls for several months. Then the CIA discovered the other side to Salameh, learning that he had been behind the hijacking of a Sabena aircraft to Lod airport in Israel. Then there was the massacre at Munich and clearly further contact became very difficult.
When the dust from Munich had settled and Salameh had taken up his new position with Force 17, he approached Ames again in mid-1973 and said that Arafat would be willing to join in peace talks on the basis that Israel had a right to exist and that Jordan would become the home for a Palestinian state. Ames contacted Richard Helms, then US ambassador in Iran and later director of the CIA, who relayed the message to Kissinger when he travelled with the Shah to Washington in late July. At this stage, Kissinger was not prepared to countenance negotiation with the PLO or the betrayal of Jordan, a strong ally of the US, so he rebuffed Arafat.
But in October that year, the Yom Kippur War between the Arabs and Israel broke out. After early gains by Egypt it became clear that Israel had turned the tide and was heading for victory. On the fourth day of the war, Salameh again contacted Ames to say that both Egypt and Syria would be prepared to discuss peace and so would the Palestinians. Once the war was over and a ceasefire in place, Kissinger looked again at the Arafat offer and found it more attractive. There might be a way of reducing the influence of the PLO in the region and cutting the Soviets out of their role in the Palestinian movement if the PLO could be coopted into some form of talks. On November 3, 1973, General Vernon Walters, then a deputy director of the CIA, was sent on a secret mission to meet with Salameh who attended as Arafat’s personal representative in Rabat, Morocco. It is inconceivable that the CIA did not know of Salameh’s involvement with international terrorism at the time of the meeting. The meeting produced little of political value but the PLO were anxious to convince the Americans that they were reasonable people.
‘Walter’s meeting achieved its immediate purpose: to gain time and to prevent radical assaults on the early peace process,’ Kissinger later wrote. ‘After it, attacks on Americans — at least by Arafat’s faction of the PLO — ceased.’[118]
On the personal instructions of Yasser Arafat, Salameh was responsible for enforcing the agreement. To do so, he developed a relationship with Bob Ames, station chief in Beirut, which at the end of 1973 produced exactly the kind of result the Agency had hoped for. Salameh warned the CIA that there was a plot to shoot down Kissinger’s plane when it arrived in Beirut as part of his Middle East shuttle after the Arab-Israeli war, when he was trying to broker acceptable territorial boundaries. The aircraft was diverted and Salameh provided armed men from Force 17 to look after Kissinger during his stay in Lebanon.[119]
Because of this new relationship, Salameh, one of the world’s most notorious terrorists, was able to visit the US with considerable freedom. In 1974, when Arafat made his famous speech at the United Nations, Salameh came in the PLO’s official party to New York and met with CIA officials in a room at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. At that meeting, Ames introduced Salameh to his successor as CIA chief in Beirut to ensure there was no break in what had developed into a mutually beneficial relationship. Both Arafat and Salameh were buoyed up by the apparent covert support of the US and the Americans were grateful for a productive intelligence connection into the heart of the Palestinian terrorist network. Their faith appeared to be justified when Salameh promised that rather than just keeping Fatah from attacking American targets, he would try and ensure other PLO groups kept away as well.
Two years later, in the middle of the Lebanese civil war, it was Salameh who helped the Americans to evacuate 250 US citizens from the country. Two American convoys, one from the city to the sea and the American Sixth Fleet and the other by road through the Shouf Mountains to Syria, were protected by the heavily armed fighters of Force 17. The protection merited a personal letter of thanks to Arafat which, with Kissinger’s usual caution, omitted to mention either Arafat’s name or the PLO. Salameh received his own vote of thanks when he married
Georgina Rizak, a former Miss Lebanon and Miss Universe. The Agency invited the couple on an all-expenses-paid honeymoon to the States, where they went first to Hawaii and then — realizing a lifetime’s ambition for Salameh — to Disney World in Florida.
Salameh also made two trips to the CIA headquarters at Langley, where he charmed his hosts and provided a detailed analysis of the Palestinian movement and the character of Yasser Arafat. He also told them that Arafat was not beholden to the Soviet Union or anyone else and, while they might take money from the Arabs and send some men for training in Moscow, a Palestinian state would be neither communist nor a dictatorship.[120]
This delicate courtship between the Agency and the PLO led Arafat to believe that he had greater access to the American political process than he really had. He believed that by showing good will and providing proof of his moderate policies, he might both engage in peace talks and persuade the Americans to support his ideas for a Palestinian homeland. When Jimmy Carter entered the White House in 1977 and made clear that peace in the Middle East was a priority, Arafat thought that his time had come. But his and Salameh’s operations were not taking place in a vacuum. The Israelis had been following Salameh’s contacts with the CIA almost from the beginning.
In late 1973, for example, a Palestinian called the US embassy in Beirut, warning that he had information about threats to American citizens. To establish his bona tides, he told the American diplomat to listen to a specific message on Radio Damascus which was broadcast at the exact time he had described. Bob Ames got in touch with Salameh, who denied all knowledge of the contact. Concerned that Arafat may have been trying to open a back channel to the Americans, Salameh tracked down the Palestinian in question who confessed to being a spy for Mossad, and was executed.[121]
In July that year an Israeli hit squad had tried to assassinate Salameh in Lillehammer in Norway. They tracked their target to a restaurant and gunned him down, to discover the next day that they had shot the wrong man. Their victim was Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter who had married a local girl. In what was an unusual example of Mossad incompetence, the whole hit squad was arrested by the Norwegian police. After one of the team was placed in solitary confinement, it was discovered that he suffered from claustrophobia. He spelled out details of the whole operation in exchange for a bigger room with a window. It was then that the world learned that the Israelis had decided to track down and kill all those who had been involved in the Munich massacre. From then on, Salameh took extraordinary precautions to protect himself from assassination.
But marriage to Georgina Rizak appears to have dulled Salameh’s well-honed instincts for survival. A reconnaissance unit from Mossad discovered in late 1978 that, when he was in Beirut, Salameh broke the cardinal rule of any security risk: he drove to work every day in the same Chevrolet station wagon from his flat along the Rue Verdun to the Fatah headquarters. In January 1979, Mossad occupied an apartment with a clear view of this route, parked a Volkswagen packed with explosives on the Rue Verdun and blew it up as Salameh’s car drew alongside. He and his two bodyguards were killed in the explosion and, at a stroke, Western intelligence lost its single most important conduit to Middle East terrorists.
For ten years, Salameh had provided security for Americans living and working in the Middle East. He had saved Henry Kissinger from assassination, alerted American ambassadors in Beirut to plots against them, and helped evacuate 250 US citizens from Lebanon. He had also passed on valuable intelligence about the workings of the PLO and the views of Yasser Arafat. The Americans and their allies had received what all intelligence agencies want: real time intelligence from a top source, who not only had access to operational information but could provide details about the thinking and the relationships in the leadership of the PLO.
His relationship with Salameh helped advance the career of Robert Ames, one of the Agency’s most talented operators. He became the CIA’s national intelligence officer for the Middle East, then personal advisor on the Middle East to Secretary of State George Shultz. As Schultz records in his memoirs, Ames retained excellent contacts with the PLO leadership but, with Bill Casey as DCI, there were occasions when the two men operated back channels to Arafat in defiance of explicit orders from the Secretary of State. Even so, Schultz considered Ames valuable enough to keep on as a close advisor.[122]
There is no doubt that Ames’ decisions to sup with the devil, at a time when Arafat was encouraging terrorist attacks on Western targets, was an act of classic political expediency. For the CIA it was a trade-ofFbetween no intelligence at all and good intelligence, which might save the lives of Americans and perhaps of American allies. Above all, it was a bargain which worked. It gave the US access and insight into the PLO. It was this, of course, that infuriated the Isarelis. Without the Salameh conduit, it is doubtful if the impression could have been sustained through the Nixon, Carter and Reagan years that Arafat was really a sheep in wolfs clothing, a moderate who was ready to do business. The kind of deals Arafat wanted (a Palestinian homeland in exchange for recognizing Israel’s right to exist) were anathema to successive Israeli governments. It is clear, therefore, that Salameh was not murdered simply out of revenge for Munich. With his death, Americans became a terrorist target once again and, while Ames retained good contacts in the PLO, the supply of reliable operational intelligence was substantially reduced.
Ironically, it was Ames himself who was to fall victim to a new form of terrorism four years after Salameh’s assassination. After Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran in 1979, there was an immediate growth of terrorism, spread by Islamic fanatics in Tehran who wanted to gain influence in the Middle East and the world. Their most active groups were based in Lebanon. It was Hizbollah who organized the car bomb at the American embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983. Ames had just begun to chair a meeting in an office above the portico of the embassy when the bomb went off, killing Ames, CIA station chief Kenneth Haas, and all but two of the Agency’s officers in Beirut. It was a devastating blow, and a tragic illustration of how valuable real human intelligence is to prevent that kind of attack. The Americans had no warning of the bombing, in part perhaps because the PLO had been virtually destroyed in Lebanon following the Israeli invasion the year before. At the same time, despite their best efforts, the CIA had no reliable sources inside the new Iranian-sponsored terrorist network and had to rely instead on technical intelligence.
