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By Root 811 0

let down his guard by leaving his hotel in Athens to buy a newspaper, giving Mossad enough time to burgle his room and leave a bomb under the bed. Just before dawn the next day he woke to answer the telephone to a strange caller, and was blown to smithereens when the line went dead. In June, two Palestinians who had been reconnoitring El Al’s offices in Rome were blown up in their Mercedes. Before the month was over, Mossad struck at Muhammed Boudia, an Algerian working as a theatre director in Paris, who while having no connection to Munich had been responsible for the attacks on the oil-storage facility at Trieste in August 1972. His fatal mistake was to make his security checks a habit. Living in Paris he drove a grey Renault 16 whose underside he carefully inspected each morning. Burglars broke into the car at night, while he visited a girlfriend, fixing a landmine packed with nuts and bolts under the seat. When Boudia got into the vehicle and switched the ignition key he was blown to pieces and engulfed in flames. Black September immediately took its revenge when a Palestinian gunman shot dead colonel Yosef Alon, the Israeli deputy defence attache to the embassy in Washington, on his suburban lawn as he went to garage his car after returning from a party.

Mention of the US raises another reason why Mossad was so keen to kill Ali Hassan Salameh, beyond his responsibility for Munich. Since 1969 he had been in contact with Robert Ames, the head of the CIA Beirut station and a key Agency analyst of the Middle East. The CIA was interested in recruiting senior Fatah figures, probably to forestall attacks on Americans around the world. Mistaking his man, Ames twice offered Salameh huge sums of money (on one occasion US$3,000,000) only to be rebuffed by the playboy terrorist, who had money enough. These contacts, which doubtless came to the notice of Mossad, increased the urgency of killing Salameh.

In 1973 Mossad began to assemble plausible evidence that he was in Scandinavia, searching for a soft Israeli target on Europe’s northern periphery. When agents in Switzerland monitored the movements of a twenty-eight-year-old Algerian, Kemal Benaman, who flew from Geneva to Copenhagen and then on to Oslo, they thought they had a firm lead. A dozen Mossad agents were flown to the Norwegian capital to trail Benaman. When Benaman drove north to Lillehammer, they followed him. They thought that one of the men he met in a cafe was Ali Hassan Salameh. This person was tracked in turn, even into the municipal swimming pool where he was watched by an innocent-seeming female bather as he chatted in French with another Arab or North African swimmer in the middle of the pool. Agents followed ‘Salameh’ to an apartment in the Nivo district where he appeared to be living with a pregnant Norwegian woman. That he went about on a bicycle or by bus and appeared to know the small town well did not seem to raise any questions. When Mike Hariri’s agents contacted Zvi Zamir for authorisation to kill this personage, any queries were perfunctory. Late one night ‘Salameh’ and his girlfriend left a cinema showing Where Eagles Dare and took the bus homewards. Holding hands they walked up the hill to their flat. A car pulled up on the opposite side of the street, two men jumped out, and shot ‘Salameh’ ten times with silenced Berettas. He was in fact a young Moroccan waiter, with an extra job as a pool attendant, called Achmed Bouchiki, out for a night with Toril Larsen Bouchiki, his expectant wife. Any meetings with Arabs or North Africans he had had were chance encounters in which, far from home, he had merely desired to speak languages that came easier to him than Norwegian.

This time, the Mossad agents were not allowed to go quietly into the night. They had stuck out like sore thumbs in a small provincial town where their Mediterranean appearance and clumsy surveillance operations had aroused suspicions. As they headed back to Oslo in their rental cars, the Norwegian police were not idle, having noted the licence plate of a car that sped out of Lillehammer