The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (36 page)

In early 1978 officers from Caesarea, Mossad’s elite operational unit, began once again to collect intelligence on Salameh’s daily itinerary in Beirut. They did so with an eagerness that bordered on obsession. Aaron J. Klein, the author of
Striking Back
, reported that in his interviews with retired Caesarea officers, they described killing Salameh as a form of closure—“We want to ‘close the circle.’ ” They knew Black September no longer existed. They knew there were other Palestinian terrorists with more blood on their hands than Salameh. But Salameh was always at the top of their hit list. Initially, they contemplated dropping a large bomb on Salameh’s apartment. But architects studied the building and concluded that too many innocent lives would be lost. “
We followed Ali Hassan extensively,” said a former Mossad director general, “using all intelligence means. We knew his bodyguards never left him for a second.”

Killing the Red Prince would not be easy. For one thing, his security was not light.
Ali Hassan had stashed Kalashnikovs in every room of
his apartment and office. He had a small platoon of armed men guard his apartment building off Rue Verdun in Ras Beirut. Heavy steel shutters had been installed on the Verdun apartment’s windows. He always traveled in a convoy of cars with a squad of bodyguards. He rarely left Beirut.

But for all his precautions, Ali Hassan was indeed fatalistic, morbidly so at times. “
I know that I’ll die,” he told Shafik al-Hout, the PLO’s media chief. “I shall be murdered, I shall fall in battle.” When
Time
magazine correspondent Dean Brelis asked him if he was worried about an Israeli assassination attempt, Salameh replied, “
They’re the ones who should be worried after all their mistakes. But I know that when my number is up, it will be up. No one can stop it.” He told Brelis that he really needed a vacation: “Maybe a beach in Brazil or the Caribbean. But I can’t just go out and get on an airplane. I don’t know if I can ever fly from one country to another again.”

Mossad’s Caesarea chief, Mike Harari, kept looking for a gateway, a window that would allow his operatives to get close enough to Salameh to carry out the hit. Harari was the same officer who’d led the bungled Lillehammer assassination attempt against Salameh in 1973. A driven, charismatic clandestine officer, his subordinates nicknamed him “Caesar.” At one point, a Mossad officer pointed out to his colleagues that Salameh had told
Monday Morning
in a 1976 interview that he loved karate. He looked fit. So did this mean he worked out in a gym? They scoured the Beirut Yellow Pages to make a list of likely gymnasiums, and then they sent agents into the various gyms in an attempt to spot Salameh. It reportedly took months, but eventually a Mossad agent found himself sitting naked next to Salameh in the Continental Hotel’s sauna. Salameh, it turned out, was a member of the Continental’s sports club, and he worked out nearly every afternoon. Mossad tentatively prepared a bomb that could be hidden under the sauna bench—but the plan was vetoed as likely to kill innocent civilians.

Eventually, Mossad came up with an alternative. Surveillance teams in Beirut identified the location of Salameh’s apartment in the upscale
neighborhood of Snoubra in Ras Beirut. This was the apartment he shared with his second wife, Georgina Rizk. And they noted the route he regularly took from his apartment to that of his mother and sister, who lived nearby in Ras Beirut. This pedestrian information—acquired at considerable cost with human agents on the ground—gave the Israelis the opportunity to mount an attack. The operation began in early November 1978. It required the deployment of some fifteen Caesarea operatives into Beirut and a considerable budget.

The first Mossad agent to arrive was Erika Mary Chambers, a thirty-year-old British passport holder. Previously, Chambers had spent four years living in Germany. But before that, she had studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where Mossad had recruited her. Upon her arrival in Beirut, Chambers offered to work as a volunteer at the House of Steadfastness of the Children of Tel al-Zatar, a charity dedicated to helping survivors and orphans from the siege of the Tel al-Zatar Palestinian refugee camp. By some accounts, Chambers was introduced to Ali Hassan Salameh in Tel al-Zatar and they became friendly. (This seems somewhat improbable.)
According to Peter Taylor, whose
States of Terror
contains the most authoritative account of the operation, Chambers rented an eighth-floor apartment on Beka Street; her neighbors knew her as “Penelope,” an eccentric young Englishwoman who loved cats and could often be seen sitting on her balcony, painting street scenes. From her balcony, Chambers could observe Salameh’s battered Chevrolet station wagon driving nearly every afternoon on Beka Street, followed by a Land Rover filled with armed guards. Salameh usually sat in the backseat of the Chevrolet, with a bodyguard on either side.

In mid-January 1979, several other Mossad officers arrived in Beirut, traveling on forged Canadian and British passports.
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They checked in to different hotels and rented a Volkswagen Beetle. Two frogmen from
an Israeli missile boat several miles offshore delivered eleven pounds of hexagene explosives to a deserted beach, where they were picked up by other agents and packed into the Volkswagen. They parked the Volkswagen on Beka Street below Chambers’s apartment. And then they waited.

A few days earlier, Salameh had been warned by a most unlikely source that Mossad was plotting to assassinate him. Bashir Gemayel, the Phalangist warlord, had heard from his Mossad sources that a hit on Salameh was imminent. Gemayel told one of his associates, Karim Pakradouni, to warn Salameh. “
I think Bashir had some
crise de conscience
,” Pakradouni told Peter Taylor, “and wanted to inform Abu Hassan about the operation.” When Taylor asked Pakradouni why he thought Mossad wanted to assassinate Salameh, he replied: “Because he was a member of Black September and because he had a relationship with the American Embassy in Beirut.… The policy of Israel was to destroy any contact between the PLO and the USA.… So quickly the Mossad realized that Abu Hassan was not just a security threat, but a political danger because he represented the Palestinian window on America.”

Frank Anderson, the chief of station in Beirut at the time, had an evening meeting with Salameh in his apartment in early January 1979. “
He told me,” Anderson said, “that he’d heard the Israelis were targeting him. I said he should take the warning seriously.”

Salameh’s sister and mother also warned him. His sister Nidal told Taylor that she knew her brother had once gone to a fortune-teller who had told him that he would die at the age of thirty-seven—the same age his father had been killed by the Israelis in 1948. Ali Hassan had just laughed. “He meant such a lot to me,” Nidal said, “and I thought he was too great to die, too great to be killed. I thought he was immortal—that it was impossible for him to die.”

His mother, Um Ali, told Taylor, “
The last time I saw him I warned him. I told him that I had a feeling that something bad would happen to him. He laughed and said not to worry: he would live another fifty
years. I told him fifty years were not enough.… As he left, I felt I would never see him again.”

Mustafa Zein saw Ali Hassan on the evening of January 21, 1979. Ali Hassan knew it was Mustafa’s birthday the next day, so he stopped by that evening at Mustafa’s newly renovated penthouse suite in the Bedford Hotel. “
He asked me how I planned to celebrate my birthday,” Zein recalled. “I replied that I didn’t want to celebrate. And then he walked over to my bookshelves and pulled down a book. He’d chosen
The City of Death
. I said, ‘Ali, put it down.’ And then I walked downstairs with him to his car and we hugged each other.”

January 22, 1979, was a cold and gray day in Beirut. It was the birthday of Salameh’s young niece, and Ali Hassan had promised he would stop by his mother’s apartment in the late afternoon for the birthday party. He then intended to drive on to Damascus, where Arafat was expecting him to attend a meeting of the Palestinian National Council. That afternoon at 3:25
P.M.
Salameh kissed Georgina good-bye—she was five months pregnant. He then got into the backseat of the tan Chevrolet station wagon. At the last moment, one of his aides, a young man named Jamal, came running up with a written message. It was yet another warning from Bashir Gemayel’s Phalange, saying the hit would happen in the next day or two. One of Salameh’s guards got out of the station wagon, and Jamal took his place. His driver headed out toward Rue Verdun with the Land Rover jeep following. Just a kilometer away, the convoy turned right from Rue Verdun onto Beka Street and glided past Erika Chambers’s eighth-floor balcony. Just then a woman driving behind the Land Rover suddenly sped up and, passing the backup car, cut in behind Salameh’s Chevy station wagon. As the Chevy came abreast of the parked Volkswagen,
Chambers held her breath and pushed a remote-control switch. The Volkswagen exploded, enveloping the Chevy in a huge ball of fire. It too exploded, and so too did the car driven by the woman,
a thirty-four-year-old British
secretary named Susan Wareham. She died along with Salameh and his bodyguards.

“
It was like hell,” an eyewitness told Peter Taylor. “There was a flash, then a big bang.… So many dead people, burnt cars and young bodies littering the street. Then I saw Abu Hassan Salameh getting out of a car and falling on the ground. The people told me who he was.” By sheer coincidence, Abu Daoud, the mastermind of the Munich Olympics attack, happened to be in the neighborhood and rushed down the street to see the wounded Salameh lying in the street. “His face was badly cut,” Abu Daoud said.

Still alive, Salameh was taken in an ambulance by the Red Crescent (the local equivalent of the Red Cross) to the hospital of the American University of Beirut, just five hundred yards away, where surgeons tried to extract a metal splinter lodged in his brain.
He died on the operating table at 4:03
P.M.

In the midst of the carnage, Erika Chambers calmly walked out of her apartment building, climbed into a rented Datsun, and drove away toward the beaches of East Beirut. Late that evening, she rendezvoused with two Mossad officers in a rubber raft who motored her out to an Israeli naval ship.
^*2

Eight other people were killed by Chambers’s car bomb: Salameh’s two bodyguards and driver, the British secretary Susan Wareham, a German nun who happened to be walking on the sidewalk, and three Lebanese civilians. Sixteen people were wounded.

Frank Anderson was preparing for a meeting with Salameh when he heard the explosion. When he received a phone call from an embassy officer saying that Salameh might have been hit, Anderson drove to Salameh’s apartment and only then learned what had happened.

Mustafa Zein had spent the entire day holed up in his Bedford suite. With a heavy sense of foreboding, he’d even unplugged his telephone.
So a messenger had to be sent by Force 17 to tell Mustafa the news. He then rushed to the American University of Beirut hospital, but by the time he arrived Ali Hassan had died.

Early the next morning Anderson came by the Bedford and found Zein reading the Koran. Anderson sat down and took the time to write a condolence note to Salameh’s eldest son, explaining what his father had meant to him.

Frank also penned a note to one of Salameh’s widows, the first wife, Nashrawan Sharif.

That afternoon more than
twenty thousand people attended Salameh’s burial in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Cemetery. Like his father, Hassan Salameh, Ali was dead at the age of thirty-seven.
Monday Morning
published a picture of Yasir Arafat helping to carry the casket. A poignant photo appeared on the cover of the Beirut weekly depicting a crestfallen Arafat, his arm wrapped around Ali Hassan Salameh’s thirteen-year-old son, Hassan. The boy wore a military beret on his head, and a Fedayeen’s
keffiyeh
was draped around his shoulders. Someone had shoved a Kalashnikov assault rifle into his small hands. It was a staged photo op. But a glassy-eyed Arafat was clearly devastated. He’d thought of Ali
Hassan as his own son. “
We have lost a lion,” he told reporters in Damascus. At the gravesite, he shouted out to the throngs of mourners, “We bury a martyr! We will continue to march on the road toward Palestine. Goodbye, my hero.”