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By Root 960 0

they were not released by the German authorities, he and his colleagues would blow the plane up in mid-air. The German government immediately obliged, taking the three men to Riem airport. Suddenly their hijacker rescuers diverted the Lufthansa jet to Zagreb, where they circled the aircraft which was already running low on aviation spirit. The Germans hastened to fly the three prisoners to Zagreb, where the hijacked plane also landed. Instead of releasing the thirteen passengers and crew, the hijackers took the three Palestinian prisoners on board and ordered the pilot to fly to Libya. The suspiciously sparse complement of passengers has suggested to some that this entire saga had been arranged by the German government and the PFLP, which carried out the hijacking, in order to be free of their three terrorist prisoners before Germany became the victim of more terror. Be that as it may, a physically sickened Golda Meir immediately sanctioned the next Caesarea operation.

Mahamoud Hamshari was a thirty-eight-year-old Palestinian with a PhD in history. He acted as the PLO’s mouthpiece in Paris. As an unofficial diplomat he lived in some style on the Rue d’Alésia, with his French wife Marie-Claude and his daughter Amina. He saw nothing untoward when an Italian journalist asked for a meeting, although the man was a Mossad agent seeking Hamshari’s address and phone number. The same man lured Hamshari out of his apartment long enough to allow burglars from Mossad’s Keshet unit to case the premises, photographing the interior from every angle. A second visit by the burglars enabled them to affix a thin slab of plastic explosive under the telephone on the desk where Hamshari worked during the day. A small detonator was wired to an antenna capable of picking up coded radio signals. Late the next morning, Hamshari took a phone call. ‘Hello?’ he asked. A voice said: ‘Can I please speak with Dr Hamshari?’ ‘He is speaking,’ Hamshari replied. At that point the apartment erupted as an explosion showered glass on to the street below. Hamshari died three weeks later in hospital, still muttering about the mystery Italian journalist. The method of his murder, since he could just as easily have been shot on a dark street, was indicative of how Mossad was readily learning from terrorists. A bomb attack in Paris would attract press and public notice in a way that shooting would not, arousing fear among Palestinian terrorists. As a former Caesarea operative elaborated: ‘If I could take them down with a missile from twenty miles away, I would.’ That came in the future too. The third target was a thirty-six-year-old PLO representative, Hussain Abu-Kair, who operated from the Olympic hotel on Nicosia’s President Makarios Avenue. As far as anyone knows, he was the PLO’s clandestine contact with the Soviet KGB, which provided arms and training for Fatah militants. He does not appear to have had any direct involvement with the Munich killings. Keshet burglars got into his hotel room and placed a remote-activated bomb under his bed. On 25 January 1972, Abu-Kair returned to his room late at night, briefly switched the light on and off and went to bed. Outside, someone flicked a switch which blew him apart. In April 1973 the Caesarea team shot dead Dr Basil al-Kubaissi, a law professor at Beirut University, as he left an expensive restaurant in Paris.

Israeli counter-terror operations in Europe forced Black September to mount its attacks in remoter places considered to be softer targets. On 28 December 1972, Black September terrorists invaded the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, taking advantage of the festive atmosphere surrounding the investiture of the Thai crown prince. Six Israeli diplomats were taken hostage. Only the intervention of the Egyptian ambassador prevented a bloodbath; the weary terrorists (and the ambassador) were flown from Bangkok to Cairo.

This very public setback so infuriated Ali Hassan Salameh that he insisted on a further operation that appalled even his Fatah colleagues because of its political ramifications. Urgency was added when