Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [107]
The modus operandi was clothed in pseudo-legality. Israeli overseas intelligence would gather information on a terrorist suspect, building up a dossier that became the basis of an indictment. Acting as ‘prosecutor’ the head of Mossad would then present this to the prime minister and members of her (or his) cabinet, constituting the judge and jury. There was no ‘defence’ attorney. A special Mossad unit, code-named ‘Caesarea’, led by a veteran agent, who may have been named Mike Hariri, forty-six years old, would then set in motion operational planning. Over time Caesarea developed three specialised sub-services. Logistics experts arranged lodgings and transport, and usually spoke the local language of the target theatre. Surveillance teams, including a large number of women, kept the target under observation, sometimes for months at a time. The killers, who worked in pairs - and were known as number 1 and number 2 - were drawn from Israeli special forces. Usually they were covered by two others to expedite their getaway. There were also experts in bomb making and burglary whom we have still to encounter. Once an assassination was imminent, the plans would be referred back to the prime minister’s Committee X for a final verdict. So much for the theory.
In fact, the targets for these assassinations were chosen as much for their operational feasibility as for the subject’s links with the Munich slayings, as Mossad figures have subsequently conceded. This is an important point which needs to be heard from the horse’s mouth, a senior intelligence officer involved:
You didn’t need blood on your hands for us to assassinate you. If there was intelligence information, the target was reachable, and if there was an opportunity, we took it. As far as we were concerned we were creating deterrence, forcing them to crawl into a defensive shell and not plan offensive attacks against us. But in this field there is also a slippery slope. Sometimes decisions are made based on operational ease. It’s not that the assassinated were innocent, but if a plan existed, and those were often easiest for the soft targets, you were condemned to death.
In other words, the preliminary analytical intelligence on a given person could be bent or sensationalised by the operatives who carried out these assassinations because of that target’s relative accessibility.
The first ‘soft target’ was Wael Zu’aytir, a thirty-six-year-old translator at the Libyan embassy in Rome, whose chief claim to fame was an Italian translation of One Thousand and One Nights. He mixed in sophisticated Italian literary circles and had an Australian girlfriend. He had had nothing to do with the Munich attack, although he stupidly claimed that the Israelis themselves had plotted it, but he had been interviewed by the Italian police in connection with Palestinian terrorist attacks on oil installations in Italy. This probably sealed his fate. Entering his Rome apartment building one autumn night, carrying a bag of groceries, he was shot twelve times by Mossad agents using .22 revolvers muffled with silencers. The agents, as well as Hariri and Zamir, who oversaw the operation, were out of Italy within four hours of Zu’aytir’s demise. Any residual scruples Israel may have had about such operations disappeared when Black September hijacked a Lufthansa flight on 29 October 1972 as it neared Cyprus en route from Damascus to Frankfurt. The lead hijacker explained to the terrified pilot that this was Operation Munich, the aim being to secure the release of the three terrorists held in the wake of Fürstenfeldbruck. If