CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

MOSSAD TERRORISM AND CRIMES AGAINST PALESTINIANS AND OTHERS IN EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST

Part 1 of 2

The government of Israel perpetrates murders around the world, mostly of innocent people, and uses the Mossad as its agent in committing these crimes. During the British Mandate the Jewish Agency used the Hagana, the Irgun Z'vai Leumi and the Stern Gang to commit terrorist acts and crimes against the British authorities and the Palestinian Arabs from 1939 to 1948. It also organized the Mossad Le-Aliyah Beth, the organization for illegal immigration during the mandate. Tom Segev states:

During the British Mandate for Palestine, the Mossad was responsible for smuggling Jews out of countries where they were endangered and bringing them into Palestine indefiance of the British restrictions on Jewish immigration. (1)

Another Zionist organization working under the orders of the Jewish Agency was known as Hanokmin, "the Avengers." Immediately after World War 11, Zionist fanatics in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army decided to take the law into their own hands. Calling themselves Hanokmin, selfstyled "avengers," these illegal vigilante death squads murdered approximately 1,000 Germans without trial.

The guilty and innocent alike were killed on mere suspicion. The civilized legal norms of due process, with indictments and trials, were denied the Hanokmin's victims, setting the precedent for subsequent actions by Mossad continuing until today.

Three Israeli intelligence agents, Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan and Eli Landau, in their authoritative book The Mossad: Israel's Secret Intelligence Service, Inside Stories, document "the Avengers":

Even before the war was over, a group from the Jewish Brigade of the British Army organized itself into a revenge squad whose sole purpose was to track down Nazis. The group called itself the Hanokmin (Avengers), after a biblical reference to the avenging angels of God.

Putting together their own list from testimony given by survivors of the camps, these men bet up a network of agents and contacts throughout Europe ... (2)

When two Germans who had been captured by the Hanokmin were released by the Allies for lack of evidence, the "Avengers" who "had captured them cut the men down with a burst of machine gun fire." (3)

From then on it was official policy simply to kill Nazis immediately upon capture. When the man was tracked down to a particular house, he would receive a visit from a small party of British soldiers politely asking him to come and answer a few questions. He would be taken to a nearby field or woods, have his crimes and sentence read to him, and would then be executed. Over a thousand such corpses were discovered after the war. (4)

The Hanokmin contributed many intelligence personnel to Israel, including one of the Mossad kidnappers of Eichmann (5) and also General Aharon Yariv, Chief of Military Intelligence during the 1967 war of aggression against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. (6)

BEN-GURION ORGANIZES ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE

David Ben-Gurion organized five branches of Israeli Intelligence. Among them were Shai, the intelligence division of the Hagana terrorist organization; the Shin Bet, for internal security; the Mossad Le-Aliyah Beth, used for illegal immigration during the Mandate, and afterwards used to entice Jews by illegal and subversive methods to migrate from Arab countries. Duringone of their operations a young Arab Jewish boy was murdered by a Mossad bomb in front of a Bagdad Synagogue in January, 1951. (7)

In 195 1 Ben-Gurion reorganized these intelligence agencies, leaving Shin Bet for internal security and another branch for Military Intelligence. He organized the Mossad, an abbreviation from the Hebrew words meaning the "Institution for Intelligence and Special Assignments". The Mossad personnel were largely picked from those men and women who worked for the Jewish Agency under the name of "the Avengers" and who had already committed approximately one thousand murders in Europe after World War 11, and from members of the Hagand, Palmach, Irgun Z'vai Leumi and the Stern Gang who committed murders and massacres in Palestine. Yitzhak Shamir (alias Yzemitzky), one of the three leaders of the Stern Gang, became a career Mossad official specializing in murder operations.

In 1948 Ben Gurion had made Isser Be'eri the first Chief of Mossad. Be'eri arrested Meir Tobianski, a Hagana officer on charges of spying for the British. Tobianski was taken to a tent to face a Mossad court martial. He denied the charges. "The court martial curtly rejected his defence and within hours the lifeless body of Meir Tobianski lay on the barren field outside Beit Je'ez." (8)

Members of the Mossad Court Martial of Tobianski included Benjamin Gibli, who later became head of Military Intelligence, and Avraham Kidron and David Karon, who served in the Foreign Ministry and Mossad. (9)

The scandal of summarily executing Meir Tobianski led to the fall of Isser Be'eri, who was called by Ben-Gurion "a rascal without a shred of conscience." (10)

In February, 1953 Ben-Gurion picked Isser Hare1 to be the head of Mossad. Isser Harel emigrated to Palestine from Latvia in 1930. Originally he was a Russian Jew from the city of Vitebsk. Working for the Intelligence unit of the Hagana, Harel was in charge of coordinating the attacks and massacres in Arab villages such as Deir Yassin. Hare1 took control of intelligence operations answering only to Ben-Gurion. "He was effectively the second most powerful man in Israel." (11)

It was Harel who "collected information about Nazi war criminals," (12) and he coordinated the murders of Germans in Europe. One Mossad agent once stated: "If Isser had remained behind in Russia he would have been head of the KGB and eaten even the monster Beria for breakfast." (13)

Isser Harel ran the Mossad single-handedly "for he was answerable to nobody, and not even government ministers knew how he spent the Mossad budget." (14) He planned the campaign to kill Arabs in the Arab countries and Europe under the instructions of David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, and Levi Eshkol. He planned the abduction of Eichmann from Argentina and planned the murder of the German scientists who were working in Egypt and all other crimes which were committed by Mossad agents. He planned the stealing of enriched uranium from U.S. plants and stealing the missile boats from Cherbourg, France.

MOSSAD MURDERS GERMAN SCIENTISTS

As the head of Mossad Isser Harel became obsessed by the paranoid belief that the Egyptians were building some kind of doomsday device. (15) Harel believed that West German scientists were conspiring with the Egyptians to build such a device. Mossad, in keeping with its tradition of committing acts of premeditated murder, decided to kill the German scientists allegedly working with the Egyptians on the socalled doomsday device, a delusion in Harel's mind. Harel's decision to murder the Germans was called "Operation Damocles."

In "September 1962, Isser Harel got approval for the final stages of Operation Damocles. Meir Amit, then head of Military Intelligence, did not object, though he made it plain that he still believed the dangers posed by the German scientists were being grossly exaggerated and that Operation Darnocles was an exaggerated response." (16)

The Mossad thereupon carried out a series of murders and attempted murders under Operation Damocles. On November 1 1, 1962, Mossad agents kidnapped Dr. Heinz Krug from his office on Schillerstrasse in Munich, West Germany. Two days later, Krug's car was found. "Neither Dr. King nor his body has yet been found, although there was an anonymous telephone call to the police informing them that Dr. Krug was dead." (17)

"On the morning of November 27, 1962, Miss Hannelore Wende," the secretary to Dr. Wolfgang Pilz at a West German factory in Egypt, "opened a large parcel addressed to Dr. Pilz which according to its return label had been sent by a prominent lawyer in Hamburg. As she opened it, the parcel exploded. She was badly injured." (18)

A day later, on November 28th, another parcel arrived at the same factory in Egypt, addressed to the general office. It had come by sea from Hamburg and was marked "specialized literature." An Egyptian employee, despite what had happened to Hannelore Wende, thoughtlessly tore open the package. "Five people were killed in the explosion," (19)

On February 23, 1963, Dr. Hans Kleinwachter, an expert in electronics, turned into the quiet cul-de-sac in Lörrach, West Germany, where he had his house, when another car suddenly overtook him and screeched to a stop in front of him, blocking his way. There were three men in the car, one at the wheel, one in the passenger seat, and one in the back.

According to Kleinwachter's subsequent testimony to the police, the man sitting next to the driver got out, asked for the house of "Dr. Shenker," and then suddenly, without warning, pulled out a pistol equipped with a silencer and fired straight through the windshield. Miraculously, Kleinwachter emerged relatively unscathed. The windshield somehow deflected the force of the bullet, which lodged in the thick woolen scarf he was wearing. Kleinwachter, who was armed, tried to get at his own gun in the glove compartment, but he was too slow. The man who had attacked him ran to the car and the three made good their getaway before abandoning the car. (20)

Other Mossad agents threatened the daughter of Professor Paul Goerke, a German scientist working in Egypt, Contacting Heidi Goerke, two Mossad agents, one of them "identifying himself as an official of the Israeli Ministry of Education, Joseph Ben-Gal," threatened that they would kill Dr. Pilz and her father if he did not leave Egypt. As a result the West German government "immediately put in a request for the extradition of the two Mossad agents on the grounds that the threat to Heidi Goerke had been made in Germany, and also because the two men were wanted on suspicion of the attempted murder of Hans Kleinwachter." (21)

'Mossad and its director. Isser Harel, faced a crisis of monumental proportions. One of its agents stood accused of attempted murder in a European count ry... Harel acted with increasing - and sometimes irrational - anger under the pressure of these events." (22)

As Israel was then extorting billions of marks in cash and weapons in payments from the West Germans, Ben-Gurion did not wish to jeopardize the huge sums involved plus the supply of West German weapons, Harel resigned over the killing of the German scientists.

Meir Amit was appointed head of the Mossad. Meir Amit was the only man ever to serve both as head of Military Intelligence and subsequently as head of Mossad. Documentation recently unearthed by Benny Morris, diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, confirms Meir Amit as "a Hagana company commander engaged in the battle of Mishmar Ha'emek in 1948, and that his battalion had been ordered to expel the Arabs from the area." (23)

Although Military Intelligence had not shared Harel's delusions concerning German scientists, they also had a record of murder and attempted murder abroad. The same Benjamin Gibli who had been an accomplice in Mossad's execution of Tobianski had become head of Military Intelligence, perpetrating acts of terrorism in Cairo, Egypt, reportedly even including plans to destroy the U.S. Information Center. As a result a huge scandal erupted and Gibli was forced to resign in its wake.

Gibli was succeeded as head of Military Intelligence by Yehoshaphat Harkabi. Under Harkabi's direction, Military Intelligence carried out well-planned murders. In July, 1956, a bomb was concealed in a book that was used to murder Egyptian Lieutenant Colonel Mustapha Hafez in the Gaza Strip. Another book, sent in wrapping paper marked with the seal of the United Nations headquarters in Jerusalem was used by Military Intelligence to conceal a bomb which murdered Colonel Saleh Mustapha, the Egyptian military attache in Amman, Jordan. Stewart Steven, an authority on Israeli intelligence, in his book The Spymasters of Israel, writes that this

operation gave meaning to a phrase in one of the manuals which all recruits of the training school for both Mossad and Military Intelligence are required to study. "The mind is the most powerful weapon we possess." Harkabi had shown how the intellect can be polished to become an instrument of murder. (24)

Meanwhile, within Mossad, its history of corruption and murder continued to evolve. During the tenure of Zvi Zamir, who replaced Amit as head of Mossad in 1968, Mossad launched a campaign of murder against Palestinians abroad which continues until today. Zamir, who was born in Poland in 1924, and had joined the Palmach in 1942, personally made up a "hit list" of Palestinians.

Zamir received the blessing of the "God-Mother" Golda Meir for the gangland style murders planned by Mossad. But the "God-Mother" is authoritatively quoted as cautioning, "What happens if things go wrong?" (25) With the gross incompetence that has earmarked Mossad since its inception, things "went wrong" on the murder of its very first victim on Zamir's "hit list".

On June 1, 1972, the car of Ghassan Kanafani, a thirty-six year old Palestinian intellectual, poet and novelist, was booby-trapped in Beirut, Lebanon in an act of premeditated murder by Mossad. But with its incompetence, the Mossad agents involved simultaneously blew up his seventeen year old niece. (26)

The only real competence Mossad has ever shown has been in its public relations campaigns abroad, seducing the U.S. Congress into approving millions of dollars in subsidies for its intelligence operations. Yet its very first assassination in its so-called "anti-terrorist" counter-measures succeeded in killing a seventeen year old girl who had no involvement in anything. Indeed, most of the people on Mossad's "hit list" were individuals who represented a diplomatic, cultural and political threat to the Zionists rather than a violent or military one.

The second attempted murder was made against the twenty- nine year-old Palestinian Bassam Abu Sharif, now Spokesman for President Yaser Arafat, in Beirut on July 25, 1972, which was also incompetently carried out. A Mossad bomb concealed in a parcel sent to the victim's home only "blinded him in one eye and seriously damaged the other." (27)

Since its first two operations had been so clumsily carried out, Mossad reorganized its "operations" section and decided to make its next victim Wael Adel Zuaiter.

Wael Zuaiter was a Palestinian intellectual living in Rome who had helped gain widespread support for the Palestinian cause among Italian intellectuals. Having no security, and believing that he did not need any, Zuaiter was an ideal candidate for a "successful" Mossad murder operation. Stewart Steven writes:

At 10.30 p.m., on October 16, 1972, Zuaiter returned home from a visit to an Italian friend. Minutes later he was dead- with twelve .22 bullets in his body. Witnesses outside the flats testified that before the shooting they had noticed what appeared to be a courting couple in a green Fiat 125 parked outside. Suddenly, two men burst from the front entrance of the building, dived into the back seat of the Fiat, which roared off into the night, almost colliding with a small minibus as it went. The getaway car was found, parked some three hundred yards away, where another car had been waiting to take the assassination squad to a safe house in an elegant district of Rome. The killers returned to Israel several days later to receive handsome awards. (28)

For what did these murderers receive awards? For killing a gentle man who abhorred violence. The great Italian novelist Alberto Moravia wrote of Wael Adel Zuaiter that his

dominant characteristic was his sheer benevolence towards everyone and everything. This seemed to me a rare and precious quality, especially when I remembered that he was Palestinian and therefore had many reasons for allowing himself to resort to violence. But he rejected violence, absolutely. (29)

The Assize Court of Rome was able to obtain sufficient evidence to indict the following Mossad agents forthe murder of Wael Zuaiter: Ethel Marianne Gladnikoff, Sylvia Rafael, Abraham Gehmer, Dan Aerbel, Zvi Steinberg, Michael Dorf, Jonathan Ingleby and Albert Liberman. The indictment was as follows:

Indictment

A. that they did conspire to commit a felony (art. 416(1) (1) of the Penal Code) in that they were members of an organization in Rome, Paris, Nicosia and Oslo until 21/7/73, whose purpose was to carry out a specific criminal plan which consisted of murdering representatives of Palestinian resistance movements living in Europe;

B. that they did jointly commit premeditated aggravated murder (arts. 110, 112(1), 575, 577(3) of the Penal Code) in that they caused the death of Wael Adel Zuaiter in Rome on 16110172 by joint agreement with others and with premeditation, by firing several shots at him at close range with a pistol;

C. that they were in unlawful and aggravated possession of firearms (arts. 110, 112(1), 61(2), 699(1&3) of the Penal Code), in that they did remove from their place of domicile or property at least two unlicensed .22 pistols, at night and in an inhabited area, at the time and in the place set forth in count B. of this indictment, by prior mutual agreement in order to commit the murder therein specified. (30)

The Judgment of the Assize Court of Rome declared on December 17, 1980:

.. since the crimes had been prepared and perpetrated using identical or similar methods, the investigators reached the conclusion that it had been aplanned retaliatory action carried out systematically and efficiently, along military lines by an organization (described in some of the trial's sources of information as "counter-espionage" and "counter-terrorist") belonging to the State of Israel ....

But even though it is patently clear that any organization charged with implementing such a wide-ranging plan qualifies as "a conspiracy to commit a felony," within the meaning of art. 416 of liability, and of the fact that it necessarily involves a hierarchical structure and allocation of duties, is a complex, powerful and frightening organization, has unlawful pre-set objectives, and constitutes an imminent threat to law and order, it nevertheless is still to be proven that the defendants took part in the wicked murder in Rome, so that all the legal consequences may be drawn.

Now there is no doubt that while remote-controlled explosive devices were used in the attacks upon Mahmoud Hamchari, Hussein Bahir and Muhammad Boudia, in the attacks on Zuaiter, Basil Kubaisi and Amed Bouchikki .22 revolvers were used (two in each case), being semi-automatic weapons, fitted with a grooved barrel having six helicoidal clockwisegrooves. Moreover, theauthors of the murders used "Long rifle" shells all manufactured by the German firm "Rheinisch Westfalische Sprengstoff."

Although in Rome, Paris and Lillehammer the criminals fired different revolvers, as the investigations show it is quite likely that the firearms and ammunition were standard equipment supplied to the unit selected to carry out the orders to kill issued by the "masterminds" of the (Secret) Service. (31)

Thus the Italian Court convicted Mossad of the heinous murder of Wael Adel Zuaiter although it could not convict the individual agents because the Italian authorities had been unable to obtain their extradition.

The Italian Court decisively cleared Wael Adel Zuaiter of the Zionist smear campaign against him that he was a "terrorist":

However, there was nothing to authorize anyone to think that his activities, which were carried out in compliance with the laws of the host country, were a cover-up for any activities which, objectively, were likely to help extremist groups carrying out obviously unacceptable actions. (32)

Mossad has bamboozled the media and U.S. Administrations and Congress into believing that it is the most "efficient intelligence service in the world" and that therefore its "information is accurate." That the Italian Court decisively cleared Wael Adel Zuaiter of Mossad's accusations that he was a terrorist shows that Mossad's information is totally unreliable, concocted for self-serving motives and without supporting evidence.

Mossad's number two on its "hit list" was Mahmud Hamshari, representative of the PLO in Paris. Since his diplomatic efforts in France were having a positive effect for the Pdestinian cause, Mossad had many political reasons to eliminate Hamshari.

Stewart Steven describes Mossad's crime of murdering Mahmud Hamshari as follows:

It was obvious to Mossad's chief of special operations "Mike") that conventional methods of disposing of Hamshari had too high a risk of failure. "Mike" wanted to avoid, at all costs, a shoot-out in which some of his men could be killed or captured. Hamshari's death had to be arranged more subtly. It was to the Mossad "armorers" that "Mike" now went for help.

The armorers of a secret service agency are among the most skilled employees on the staff. They are experts on every imaginable form of gun or explosive, but are as well men of great technical skill - and the best of them - imaginative inventors. These were the men in Mossad who had decided that the semiautomatic weapon for Israeli assassination teams should be a Beretta .22 fitted with West German shells, deadly at close range, yet making very little noise. This gun was originally used by El Al sky marshals on the advice of the armorers on the grounds that if they missed their target, the bullet would not necessarily puncture the skin of the aircraft. They were adopted for use by assassination squads principally because they discouraged "long shots" - handguns are notoriously inaccurate at anything but the closest range - and also because of their deadly precision. The guns had been especially adapted by the armorers so that the very light gun powder in the cartridge of the special bullets they perfected was still sufficient to push the next round into the chamber. Now these armorers were asked to find a method to kill Hamshari.

Shortly after Zuaiter's death, a plumber turned up in the building alongside Hamshari's and began work on the pipes. No one took much notice of him as slowly he worked his way into the courtyard housing Hamshari's apartment. Theplumber was, in fact, an engineer - a Mossad armorer, a trained and skilled man who was more interested in the telephone cables running alongside the pipes than he was in the pipes themselves.

Soon Hamshari's telephone began to give him trouble and continued to do so for several days until, angrily, he called the exchange to have it fixed. What Hamshari didn't know was that he now had his own personal exchange, a truck parked near by into which his telephone line had been fed. There the engineer had been cutting in and out of Hamshari's calls until he picked up the inevitable request for professional attention.

Hamshari was told that an engineer would be round the following day. On December 7, 1972 a man reported to Hamshari's flat driving up in an official-looking van. In full sight of Hamshari for most of the time and of his bodyguards for the rest, the engineer began fixing the telephone. What no one realized was that, in its base, he had concealed sufficient explosives to blow the flat apart. Two days previously, Hamshari had received a telephone call from an Italian journalist seeking an interview. Hamshari, as a spokesman for the PLO, was quite used to such requests and, at the journalist's suggestion, agreed that they should meet at a nearby cafe two days later. The journalist said he would telephone Hamshari's flat as soon as he arrived in the morning.

At 9.25 a.m., December 8, 1972, after his wife and daughter had left the apartment (as the Mossad team from close observation knew they would), the phone rang in Hamshari's flat. He picked it up - it was the Italian. "Are you Dr. Hamshari?' the Italian asked. "Yes," replied Hamshari. He lived long enough to tell the police about the Italian and the high-pitched buzz he had heard before the explosion. A few hours later, he died. The telephone had been turned into a lethal bomb. The high-pitched signal transmitted by the caller was all that was needed to detonate it. (33)

The code-name "Mike" for Mossad's chief of special operations in charge of murders and other crimes abroad had a long history. The first "Mike" was Yitshak Shamir, who had been involved in the murders of Lord Moyne and Count Folke Bernadotte as one of the triumvirate heading the Stern Gang. After Israel was established Shamir became a career civil servant in Mossad. (34) He was the first to bear the code name "Mike," as Mossad's chief of special operations until 1962.

Shamir's successor in Mossad as "Mike" was Colonel "Mike" Harari, who according to Israeli intelligence agent Uri Dan later surfaced in Panama as "the brains behind Noriega," Panama's drug-smuggling dictator. Uri Dan wrote in his article "Israeli Spymaster the Real Power Behind Noriega" in The New York Post:

A legendary Israeli spymaster and anti-terrorist fighter is the brains and brawn behind Panama's military strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega.

Insiders say Mike Harari, who rose to become a top commander of Israel's Mossad intelligence service during a 30-year career, is the man most responsible for Noriega's uncanny ability to stay in power despite a drug-trafficking indictment and awesome U.S. pressure.

During a week-long Post investigation in Panama and Costa Rica, knowledgeable Israeli and Central American sources disclosed that Harari:

Provided Noriega with sophisticated Israeli-made eavesdropping and security equipment - installed by Israeli experts - which allows Noriega to spy on political opponents.

Helped Noriega acquire advanced military arms and rebuilt his army into a major fighting force.

Placed Noriega's wealth in secret Swiss bank accounts.

Recruited a cadre of crack Uzi-toting Israeli military veterans to serve as Noriega's personal security detail.

Has acquired such political clout that he personally fired both Panama's ambassador to Israel and Israel's ambassador to Panama.

Gets a piece of the action — up to 60 percent — from Israeli business firms operating in Panama. The money is allegedly split with Noriega.

"We call Harari 'Mr. 60 Percent,' because he gets that much from any deal that he makes," said Eduardo Herrera, the deposed Panamanian ambassador to Israel, now reportedly in Miami raising funds for an effort to oust Noriega.

Officials of a major U.S. Jewish organization who recently conducted a private mission here were told flatly that "after Noriega, Mike Harari is the man most hated in Panama." Leaders of the National Civil Crusade, the anti-Noriega forces, told those officials they consider Harari, known as "Mad Mike," to be "the brains behind Noriega."

Repeated Post phonecalls to Harari at the Panamanian Consulate in Israel and his villa in the Tel Aviv suburb of Afeka were not returned.

Harari, who looks younger than his 61 years, hooked up with Noriega shortly after ending his Mossad career in 1979.

He had first met Noriega, then chief of military intelligence, through then-Panamanian strongman Omar Torrijos in 1973.

The Tel Aviv native was already a legend in Mossad circles. His intelligence career began 40 years ago in the first days of the Jewish state, when he served the elite Palmach strike force in Italy as commander of a special unit that smuggled arms and illegal immigrants to British-controlled Palestine.

When the 1948 Arab-Israeli war ended, Harari was recruited into the fledgling Mossad, where he rose through the ranks. For a brief time in the early 1950s. he was security director of Israel's Foreign Ministry.

A specialist in anti-terrorist activity —providing him contacts with intelligence services around the world - he commanded a team that methodically hunted down and executed the Black September terrorists who massacred Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

As part of that mission, he was responsible for the biggest intelligence operational foul-up in Israeli history - the slaying in Norway of a Moroccan waiter mistaken for Black September's commander.

When Noriega came to power, Harari tied his future to his old friend - and the relationship has benefited both men tremendously.

Harari began by providing political and military services for his Panamanian partners.

In June, 1984, with Noriega eager for any international recognition, Harari arranged his first state visit ever - to Israel.

With Harari constantly by his side, Noriega was received with full honors by officials of the Foreign and Defense Ministries. Guided by then-Army Chief of Staff Moshe Levy, Noriega was given a tour of army bases and camps.

Even before the state visit, Noriega had given Harari Panamanian citizenship and named him honorary Panamanian consul in Tel Aviv, giving him valuable diplomatic privileges.

Sources say he also came to rely more and more on the mysterious Israeli as a political confidante, security adviser and financial partner ...

(According to one source) "Harari also convinced Noriega to change the name of his army to the Panama Defense Forces, like the Israel Defense Forces."

"Mike Harari made Noriega a system as well as a man,'' adds another source. "He supplied Noriega with the techniques of surveillance."

Harari recruited elite Israeli army veterans to act as Noriega's personal bodyguard - and supervise his crackdown on political opponents.

According to former top Noriega aide Jose Blandon, Harari - whom he described in congressional testimony as "a very interesting character in Panamanian politics" -even arranged for Israeli intelligence to provide security on Noriega's foreign trips.

During one such trip in 1984, Blandon told Congress, the Mossad uncovered aplot by Columbia's Medellin drug cartel to assassinate Noriega.

The strongman, Blandon said, had angered the cartel by seizing a cocaine processing plant in Panama for which the Medellin network had paid him $5 million.

Israeli and Panamanian financial sources say Harari provided the means for laundering Noriega's profits in Swiss and other foreign banks and has used the money for arms purchases.

His precise role in Noriega's drug operation, for which the Panamanian leader is under U.S. indictment, remains unclear — the same sources believe Harari is "far too clever" to be directly involved in any narcotics operation.

The connection has proved lucrative for Noriega as well as Harari.

Noriega owns two palatial homes in Israel, including one in the seaside city of Ceasarea.

Sources say Noriega also discussed with Israeli officials the possibility of receiving asylum - to the point where his wife, Felicidad, was recently reported to be in Jerusalem, looking for a school for their daughter.

Harari fiercely shuns publicity. within the past two months, at his request, the Israeli Government Press Office recalled all photos taken of him and distributed to official news services.

Just last month, Harari seized the camera of a young photographer who had snapped his picture at a posh reception featuring such guests as Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and former Foreign Minister Abba Eban.

Mike Harari operates with the quiet blessing of the Israeli government, according to both Panamanian and Israeli sources.

He has convinced three Israeli prime ministers - Menachem Begin, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Shamir - he is operating in Jerusalem's best interests.

For example, when Israeli security experts opposed his request for super-sophisticated electronic intelligence equipment, fearing it might fall into the hands of 300 Cuban experts in Panama, Harari responded:

"This is the way for us to establish through Noriega a back channel to Fidel Castro."

Richard Brenneke, an Oregon businessman with ties to both CIA and Mossad, told Congress that Harari ran a drugfunded supermarket that secretly funneled weapons to the Contras.

"If Israel ever needed something, like something for (its nuclear facility at) Dimona, it could be done" through Panama, Harari told the Miami Herald.

Sources say the Israeli Defense Ministry routinely approves all arms and equipment sales requested by Harari.

That includes electronic equipment for a special bunker Noriega built for any attempt to depose or expel him.

The bunker once featured photos of Noriega's two heroes: Adolf Hitler and Moshe Dayan. When Harari protested, the Hitler photo was taken down.

Officially, Israel insists Harari is a private citizen.

"If he is in Panama, and I have no knowledge that he is, he is there on a purely personal basis," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Ehud Gol recently.

But U.S. officials and American Jewish leaders remain unconvinced.

The State Department, pro-Israeli Congressmen and U.S. Jewish organizations have all repeatedly urged Jerusalem to pressure Harari to leave Panama.

Columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak confirmed Harari's role in Panama:

U.S. intelligence officials privately blame Mike Harari, a former top agent in Israel's famed Mossad espionage agency, for the sharp drop in intelligence collected by U.S. electronic means from Gen. Manuel Noriega's Panama.

U.S. intercepts of confidential Noriega conversations began diminishing two months ago. That was shortly after the Panamanian dictator hired Harari to use his lifetime of Mossad experience to beef up Panama's counter-intelligence. Harari then purchased top-of-the-line electronic equipment from around the world.

As a result, the United States learned little from its electronic eavesdropping during the recent coup attempted by rebel Panamanian officers.

When U.S. diplomats complained, Israel said it has no control over the former Mossad officer (echoing the Israeli response when an ex-Mossad agent was discovered training Columbian drug-runners). (35)

In addition to its murders, Mossad is deeply involved in the international narcotics trade. As well as its activities using Harari in Panama, evidence has been uncovered in Greece of Mossad's involvement in the smuggling and sale of illegal drugs in many parts of Europe. On November 11, 1986 and December 12, 1987 newspapers in Athens published authoritative articles concerning Israeli Colonel David Berens, whose Mossad cover-name is "Dodon," and his involvement in the smuggling of heroin into Greece by two of his agents who were arrested in Greece after heroin was found in their bags. Previously, in 1980, another Israeli citizen had been arrested in Greece after many kilograms of heroin had been found in her luggage, but she was only held in prison five days before she was released when Mossad intervened on her behalf.

The new victim, number three, of Mossad's murder campaign was the Palestinian Abad Al Chir, who was murdered on January 24,1973, in Nicosia, Cyprus. "Abad Al Chir went into his room at the Olympic Hotel, climbed into bed, read a while, and then turned off the light. At a distance, a Mossad agent pressed the button of his ultrasonic radio transmitter and Abad Al Chir and his room were blown to pieces." (36)

Victim number four on Mossad's "hit list" was Dr. Basil Al Kubaissi, an Iraqi professor at the American University of Beirut. On April 6, 1973, Dr. Al Kubaissi was visiting Paris. As he "was passing the beautiful Eglise de la Madeleine at the top of the Rue Royale near to Maxim's, suddenly, two men emerged from the shadows and at pointblank range killed him with their Berettas." (37)

A MASSACRE IN BEIRUT

On April 9, 1973 Mossad performed its most ambitious murders in cooperation with Military Intelligence and the Israeli paratroops. Stewart Steven recounts their murderous raid to kill Palestinians in central Beirut:

On April 6th, five men and one woman arrived at Beirut airport on separate flights from London, Rome and Paris. All of them had been to Beirut before, and, while they had been instructed to behave like ordinary tourists, they were to make sure that they knew the streets and beaches of the city as well as any local taxi driver.

No resident Mossad agents could be actively involved because of the risk of blowing their cover. In any case, their job had been done long before. The markers had been lain down for others to pick up. These markers led to Mohammed Yussuf El-Najjar, Kemal Adwan, Ali Hassan Salameh, Mohammed Boudia (visiting Beirut from Paris) ... The six Mossad agents - three travelling on British passports - rented cars from Hertz and Avis (Mercedes, Buicks, Plymouths and a Renault) on their American Express cards, inspected the four safe houses which had previously been rented for the raid, to be occupied by any member of the raiding party who for some reason had to be left behind, and then, in an ordinary commercial telegram sent from the Beirut central post office to an address in France, they confirmed that all was ready.

At 1.30 a.m. on the morning of April 9th. six rubber Zodiac landing craft, with their engines cut, wallowed into shore at Dove beach, a small out-of-the-way cove that visitors to the Beirut beaches came to to get away from the crowds. Two members of the advance party, a woman and a man behaving like a courting couple, signaled the boats in.

Apart from the crew, the boats carried thirty men all dressed in civilian clothes, many looking very "hippie" indeed. Mostly they were experienced paratroopers, with a sprinkling of officers from Military Intelligence. As the boats came in, the soldiers broke into units of five and piled into the large cars (previously hired by Mossad at the airport) which pulled up at the beach at intervals of three minutes, so that in fifteen minutes everyone had been taken care of. The Israelis were off to war in hired limousines.

The cars drove through the city's nightclub district and headed out to the inner ring of suburbs and an intersection of streets called Khaled Ben Al Walid and Rue 68. There were two main objectives as the cars stopped in the car park of an unfinished apartment block previously mapped out by the markers. The first was a seven-story building, standing between two others under construction, which was solely occupied by members of the PFLP, and the second was a three-story house on the Rue El Khartoum where Arafat's deputy Mohammed Yussuf El-Najjar and the No. 3 man in the PLO, Kamal Nasser, chief spokesman for the PLO, and Kemal Adwan, El-Najjar's deputy, were to be found.

All three men were in their apartments when the Israelis arrived. There was not much time for subtlety. The markers had done iheirjobs brilliantly, and the soldiers knew precisely where to go. The sentries at the doors of the building were killed instantly by a burst of machine gun fire. The men ran up to the second floor and simply shot off the locks of El-Najjar's door. He died instantly in a fusillade of machine gun bullets and Beretta slugs. As his children watched, his screaming wife, who tried to interpose herself between her husband and the assassins, was cut down, too, and fell across his body. A woman from the next apartment who heard the noise poked her nose out through her front door and met her death instantly.

Kamal Nasser was the next to go. He was writing a speech at his desk and was shot dead as the Israelis burst into his apartment, and Kemal Adwan was shot dead in his apartment doorway.

In the meantime, at street level, PLO soldiers, shooting wildly in all directions, were responding to the attacking forces, who were now holding their position in the foyer. One of the Mossad men now telephoned the police chief responsible for maintaining some semblance of order in the Palestinian community and reported that the Palestinians were fighting among themselves, and that a lot of people were getting hurt. He knew what the reaction would be. The police chief, with a shrug, called off the Lebanese policemen from the local station who had got momentarily involved. If the Palestinians wanted to kill themselves, then why should the Lebanese be involved?

An area around the first building was now secure for Israeli doctors to tend to the wounded, while demolition men began laying their charges against the building. Inside, four Mossad experts were going through the papers in the safes of all three men they had killed and sorting out those files which would be useful. They had exactly half an hour before the building in which they were working was due to be blown up.

At the second building, a battle was raging, but it appeared to be terribly one-sided. There was something almost obscene in the way the Arabs were being mowed down. The PLO was using the elevators to reach street level in order to engage the enemy. As each elevator reached street level, the attacking force killed all the occupants, pulled out the bodies, and sent the cars up again for the next batch.

Eventually, that building, too, was secure, and, after a fast sweep of safes and the like for documents, the demolition charges were placed in position and then set off. Slowly at first, and then with a sickening momentum, the building began to disintegrate on its foundations, killing a great many people trapped inside. There was still more work for the paratroopers. Leaving this area they sped north to a group of warehouses where the Palestinians stored their arms and equipment. After a brief gun battle this, too, was blown up.

With the raid now into the first hour, the Mossad team broke radio silence and called in helicopters stationed offshore to help lift off the wounded. Simultaneously, Beirut's police chief received a telephone call, ostensibly from the Lebanese Army, saying that they were putting helicopters in the air to pinpoint the center of the trouble, while Beirut's coastal command received similar telephone calls supposedly from the police advising that they were putting helicopters in the air for the same reason. Such was the incredible confusion that no one bothered to check with anyone else. Surprise had been total.

Two of the attacking forces had been killed and one seriously wounded. Only one of the original Mossad men had been hurt - his hand crushed by a car door. In just over two hours, it was all over.

The commando force, accompanied this time by the six Mossad agents, left the way they had come, by boat.

Back in Beirut, all that the Lebanese authorities found were the cars neatly parked on the promenade with the keys in the ignition. (The rental bills were subsequently paid through American Express.) More than a hundred Palestinians lost their lives in the action. Of the main targets, only Mohammed Boudia and Ali Hassan Salameh were still alive; by chance they were out of Beirut when the Israelis struck.

In one comparatively minor detail, the raid was not a total success. The Israelis had hoped to deny any involvement at all and had prepared a cover to make it impossible for anyone ever to have got at the real truth. The Israelis hoped it would appear that the battle had been fought out between rival groups of Palestinians jockeying for supremacy. But the fact that the helicopters had had to be called in, made that impossible. The following morning, Israeli chief of staff General David Elazar told journalists: "Israel will not play by the rules of limited warfare. You can't win a war by defense. If we cannot prevent war, we will bring about a quick and decisive victory as we have in the past." (38)

Among the murderers in this massacre jointly perpetrated by Mossad, Military Intelligence and Israeli paratroopers was Yonathan Nethanyahu, the brother of former Israeli U.N. Representative Benjamin Nethanyahu who became Deputy Foreign Minister in 1989. Just as Yonathan Nethanyahu, known as Yoni, was "one of the men who had killed Kemal Adwan" (39) in Beirut, so his younger brother Benjamin, known as Bibi, murdered defenseless Arab women and children, blowing up their houses over their heads, on numerous Israeli paratrooper raids.

Thus Mohammad Yussuf El Najjar, Kemal Adwan, Kemal Nasser and other leaders of the PLO were coldbloodedly murdered along with over a hundred other Palestinians and Lebanese, including women and children.

If Palestinians blew up two or three buildings in Tel Aviv and a hundred Jews were killed, the whole world would be in an uproar against those "Palestinian terrorists." The U.S. Congress and Administration would send condolences to the Israeli government and would condemn the perpetrators in the ugliest possible terms.

MURDER BY MISTAKEN IDENTITY

On June 28, 1973 Mossad agents murdered Mohammed Boudia in Paris. They placed a bomb "under his white Renault, parked in the Rue des Fosses-St.-Bernard, which was set off by a remote-control device as soon as he got into his car, killing him instantly." (40)

The next Mossad murder, killing Moroccan waiter Ahmed Bouchiki in Norway through a case of mistaken identity, ranks among the notable bungles in the history of intelligence. Stewart Steven reports:

At 10.40 p.m. on July 2 1, 1973, in Lillehammer in Norway, an Israeli assassination team killed a man who they believed to be All Hassan Salameh. Not only did they get the wrong man, but Norwegian police managed to apprehend some members of the back-up team, interrogate them and put them on trial. The nightmare question — what happens if things go wrong?— had finally become reality. (41)

The Mossad team organized by "Mike" Harari included Abraham Gehmer and many of the agents previously involved in the murder of Wael Zuaiter in Rome. Stewart Steven describes their modus operandi in the Norwegian fiasco:

The team consisted of an attractive South African Jewess called Sylvia Rafael, who worked as a photographer in Paris under the name of Patricia Roxburgh. A Canadian citizen, she was the only other Mossad operative in the party. By and large, she had not been used on active service missions, but through her wide press contacts in Paris and elsewhere in Europe had provided Mossad with a constant and steady flow of information about the activities of the European left and their Palestinian friends.

Others in the party included Dan Aerbel, a Danish-born Israeli, and Marianne Gladnikoff of Swedish origin, both specifically recruited for this job because they spoke the language, understood local customs, and knew the geography. Neither was told the real purpose of the journey to Norway. Their only function was to follow Benamane when he arrived and establish whom he was contacting. Zwi Steinberg, a thirty-six-year-old Brazilian Israeli, was the baggage master on this, his first real trip abroad as a Mossad operative. It was his job to look after equipment and to organize the hiring of the cars the team would need, as well as to arrange their getaways. Michael Dorf, aged twenty-seven, whose last job before he had been recruited by Mossad two years earlier had been at the Tel Aviv telephone exchange, was the group's communications officer. Little or nothing is known about the killer. He traveled to Norway under the name of Jonathan Ingleby, an Englishman from Manchester. According to eyewitnesses, he was tall and blond, very Scandinavian in appearance. Benamane arrived in Oslo on schedule, checked into a local hotel, and then took a train to Lillehammer ....

Benamane left Lillehammer on the 2.08 train that afternoon to Oslo, where Sylvia Rafael, Abraham Gehmer and Dan Aerbel were waiting for him. Mike had originally doubted that Lillehammer could possible be the site for Benamane's "meet" with Salameh, and so had held most of his team back in the capital. Benamane was tracked to the Stephen Hotel in central Oslo and was heard making preparations to return to Geneva the following day, which indeed he did. Gehmer and Aerbel then returned to Lillehammer.

By now, of course, Mike had heard from his people in Lillehammer, who had supplied him with a full report of Benamane's meeting at the {Caroline. The fact had the man believed to be Salameh had ridden off on a bicycle might have alerted Mike to the inherent improbability that this was the man they were after ....

On the next day, July 21, 1973, the Mossad first team checked into the Victoria Hotel, Lillehammer, believing that they were at last on the track ofthe man they had been seeking. At 11.15 a.m., "Salameh" was spotted entering the municipal swimming pool, and Marianne, rapidly renting a bathing suit, followed him in. There, he met a European with a beard with whom he spoke French, none of which could be picked up by Marianne. He then left with an obviously local girl who was visibly pregnant. This time he was closely trailed.

The Arab and the girl boarded a bus and traveled to a new housing estate on the outskirts of the town and entered an address, Rugdeveien 21A. Mike had had the chance of a good look and was convinced. Benamane had come all the way from Geneva to meet him. He must be the man they were after.

At 2.00 p.m., the assassination squad arrived. The three men, driving a dark-green Mercedes, booked themselves into the Oppland Tourist Hotel, all using false documentation and false identities. Jonathan Ingleby 's British passport had never been issued by the Passport Office in London. Rolf Baehr's German passport number 408948L had one too few digits, and Gerard-Emile Lafond's passport number 996262 was also later discovered to be a forgery. At about the same time, still another agent, called Tahl, checked in to the Esso Olrud Hotel on the Autostrat. The team was in position and ready to go ....

At 8.00 p.m., the man believed to be Salameh, with the same woman at his side the team had seen previously, entered the local cinema to see Where Eagles Dare, featuring Richard Burton. They left at 10.35 p.m. At 10.40 p.m., the couple got off their bus and began the short walk to their flat. At first they didn't notice the Mazda coming slowly toward them. When they did, it was too late. Two men - one specifically identified as Jonathan Ingleby -jumped from the car and began pumping bullets from their Berettas into the Arab. All he managed to say was "No!" before, mortally wounded, staggering desperately in the attempt to get away, clawing at his stomach, he collapsed in a bleeding mess on the pavement with the screaming woman huddled over him. At 10.50 p.m., the police were notified, and within minutes of the shooting were at the scene of the crime. The Israelis knew that they had little time. The Mazda was ditched, and the team in their various cars, the green Mercedes and a white Peugeot filled with agents, made its way to the road to Oslo. They were almost literally in the middle of nowhere, and it would take some time to reach the safety and anonymity of a big city.

One can't be sure when they and Zwicka Zamir realized that the wrong man had been killed. The most that could be said of Ahmed Bouchiki, the unfortunate man gunned down so recklessly, a Moroccan-born waiter who lived and worked in Lillehammer and was married to the girl the execution squad had seen him with, was that he had loose links with Black September, though almost certainly he had never taken any part in any operation or shown much inclination todo so. If Benamane was doing anything in Lillehammer, he was on a recruiting mission - perhaps hoping to use Bouchiki in future operations in Scandinavia, where his knowledge of the language would be invaluable. Whether he agreed or not, no one save Benamane, and certainly not Mossad, could know. Whatever dark hints were subsequently dropped in the Israeli press by Mossad propagandists, the fact is that, to all intents and purposes, a totally innocent man had been brutally slain.

As far as Mossad was concerned, worse was to come. Though the Norwegian police were remarkably slow in setting up road blocks, the Peugeot, No. DA-97943, rented from Scandinavian Rent-a-Car in Oslo by Patricia Roxburgh, was spotted by police on the road from Lillehammer.

On Sunday morning, twenty four hours after the shooting, the car was seen again at Oslo airport by an alert ticket clerk who, like other employees at the airport, had been asked to keep a lookout for the vehicle. Quickly, he informed the police, and within minutes Marianne Gladnikoff and Dan Aerbel were in custody and, to use that splendid British phrase, "helping the police with their inquiries."

Oddly, perhaps because she panicked, Marianne, asked by the police for her address in Oslo, gave that of the safe house to which she and her party had gone from Lillehammer. There, the police found Sylvia Rafael and Abraham Gehmer, who were also arrested. It was Marianne who first cracked under questioning. The police already had a shrewd idea as to who had killed Bouchiki and why. It was Marianne who confirmed it. "I was asked if I were willing to perform a service for the Stale of Israel," she said in her interrogation, "and I felt obliged to do so because I had not done military service."

But it was Dan Aerbel who was most careless. On the back page of his passport, investigators found a phone number: 14-15-80. A check with the telephone company found that it was an unlisted number; the subscriber was a man called Eyal who was on record as working for El Al. The police timed their raid perfectly. A woman opened the door when the police rang. They pushed their way past her and into the living room, where three men were sitting. They were ordered against the wall with their hands up while the police searched the flat and found a pistol. It was the owner of the flat who made the first move. He introduced himself not as Eyal — obviously a cover name for the purpose of getting the telephone — but as Yigal Zigal, a senior "security officer" at the Israeli Embassy with full diplomatic immunity.

He produced his credentials and ordered the police to leave what was technically Israeli diplomatic property. But the police would have none of it, and the two men, identified as Zwi Steinberg and Michael Dorf, were arrested then and there.

The police now had six people out of the original assassination squad. The Mercedes was discovered in Denmark, obviously taken on the ferry which runs from Oslo to Copenhagen. Others of the team simply took normal commercial flights, probably in some cases using different passports from the ones they had operated under in Norway.

The two professionals, Dorf and Steinberg, had little to say to the police, but their possessions were a giveaway. Steinberg had two keys, each attached to a blue name tag, which opened an apartment in Paris. There, French investigators found more keys, similarly marked, which opened virtually every Mossad safe house in Paris, and they also discovered clues to the fact that some members of the Lillehammer team had been involved in earlier assassinations of prominent Palestinians.

In Dorf's possession was a telex message from the Amsterdam Mossad headquarters, which ran the whole European operation ...,

The Israeli government sought to put immense pressure on the Norwegians to cover up the fiasco. The Israeli attorney, Meir Rosenne, with a special commission from Prime Minister Golda Meir, flew into Norway in an attempt to intercede. He pointed out to the Norwegians that the Israeli team had the tacit approval of Norwegian security to operate in their country, but he was told, in turn, that this authority did not include the right to kill, certainly not the right to kill an apparently completely innocent Moroccan waiter.

Eventually, the six Israelis had to face the indignity of a full-scale public trial as accessories to the murder of Ahmed Bouchiki. On February 1, 1974, Sylvia Rafael was sentenced to five-and-one-half years' imprisonment, Marianne Gladnikoff to two-and-one-half years, Abraham Gehmer to fiveand- and-one-half years, and Dan Aerbel to five years. Ironically perhaps, Zvi Stemberg, who was probably more important than all of them, received only one year for espionage, and Michael Dorf was acquitted.

It was a bitter pill for Mossad to have to swallow, made worse by the fact that Mossad's hands would be very much tied from now on. Zwi Zamir knew only too well, without needing the Foreign Ministry to tell him (which it did ad nauseam) that any other killings in Europe would now be pinned directly on Israel, would get maximum publicity, and what's more, with the court records of the Lillehammer case to go by, permit newspapers as well as security organizations to reach conclusions with regard to the Israeli methodology that would be dangerous for Mossad in the extreme. (42)

Ex-CIA executive David Atlee Phillips states that "the Israeli Secret Service deserves first ranking on my or any other list." (43) The murder of Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccanborn waiter in Norway, in a grossly incompetent case of mistaken identity makes one wonder about the competence of CIA officials who peddle such a line.

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