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Opening
July 1973, a team of 15 Mossad agents using false passports fly into Oslo, the capital of Norway. Mossad is Israel's foreign intelligence agency, and its agents are in Oslo to track down the mastermind behind the bloody attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 11 Israelis were killed. For the past nine months, they've been working their way through a retaliation hit list, and the man they're after today is probably the most important on that list. His nickname is the Red Prince, and the Israelis want him dead.
The Red Prince's real name is Ali Hassan Salame, and he's the head of 417, an elite unit in the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He's also allegedly part of Black September, the clandestine organization that carried out the Munich attack.
The Mossad agents have been tipped off that Ali Hassan Salame is in Scandinavia. They've also heard that an Algerian member of Black September will be flying to Norway to meet with Salame. When he lands, they follow the Algerian to the small city of Lilahhammer. Twice, the Algerian meets up with a man they suspect is the Red Prince. On one occasion, the two chat briefly at a local swimming pool. When one of the Mossad agents jumps into the water, she overhears him speaking in French. They know their target is multilingual, so it's another sign that they've got their man.
The Mossad agents also have some photos to help identify him, but they're quite grainy. So, the assassins watch and wait to be sure.
It's now the evening of July 21st, 1973. The Mossad agents observe their target leaving a movie theater in Lilahhammer. The woman he's with is pregnant. The pair catch the bus home and the agents follow closely behind. They get off the bus and walk towards their apartment. A car pulls up alongside them. Two people jump out, shoot their target 13 times, and then race off at high speed. The pregnant woman watches as her husband dies on the street.
The dead man's name is not Ali Hassan Salame. It's Ahmed Bushi, a Moroccanborn waiter living in Norway and about to have a child. The Mossad assassins have killed the wrong person.
But how could this happen? For one, the agents got bad intel. But it was more than just that. Ahmed Bushiki didn't really look like the man in the blurry photos. Other things didn't add up. He rode a bicycle, lived in a cheap flat, appeared to speak Norwegian, and didn't seem to take security precautions. Some of the agents raised these concerns with their superiors, but were ignored. One later said that because they only ever had small pieces of the bigger puzzle, they learned to trust the process. And so in July 1973, they followed orders and killed the wrong man.
The Red Prince, meanwhile, was still alive and well in Beirut.
Intro
Hello my friend. I'm Alan Bahari and this is Assassins, the show where we unravel history's most shocking assassinations. And today, part three in our special series about Israel and Palestine. In this episode, we cover the retaliatory assassinations after the Munich Olympics attack in 1972. It's a campaign that cemented Mossad's infamous reputation and made it the spy agency other spy agencies aspire to be. Highly organized, well-resourced, and lethal.
But the mistaken identity killing of Ahmed Bushiki in Norway was a huge news story at the time. Six Mossad agents were arrested and five of them jailed. And if they got the wrong person in Lilahhammer, what else might these elite assassins have gotten wrong? We'll probably never know. After all, intelligence agencies are secretive, and the people they are targeting often live clandestine lives as well.
Almost immediately after the Munich Olympics massacre in September 1972, Israel decides something must be done. And so, Prime Minister Golda Meir sets up Committee X, a top secret group of intelligence officials and government ministers. The committee draws up a list of names of individuals responsible for the attack and then authorizes Mossad agents to target and kill them.
Using false passports, they sneak across borders and kill at least 10 Palestinians. And they do it all in just 9 months. The Israelis call the plan Operation Bayonet. But the name later coined by the media better captures the almost mythical status of Mossad assassins, Operation Wrath of God.
So, who was on Operation Wrath of God's hit list and why?
Mossad's first kill
The Australian painter Janet Van Brown is living the dream expat life as an artist in Rome when she meets a young Palestinian translator named Wael Zwaiter. One day, Zwaiter helps her carry her paintings home, and as they walk, he serenades her with a Shakespearean sonnet. She's immediately captivated and soon becomes smitten with the young Palestinian. The pair share a love of opera and art. Later, one of her friends says she was madly in love. You could tell. And it was definitely completely mutual.
After 7 years together, Janet Van Brown and Wael Zwaiter make plans to marry. And then on the 16th of October 1972, 6 weeks after the Munich Olympics massacre, Wael Zwaiter is heading up to his apartment when Mossad agents strike. They apparently shoot him 11 times, once for each Israeli who died in Munich. The assassins are in and out within minutes. His is the first name that Israel can tick off its kill list.
The Israelis claimed that Zwaiter was the head of Black September in Rome. But was he? At the time of his death, Zwaiter was almost finished translating the classic Arabic tale One Thousand and One Nights into Italian. But he was also a representative for Fatah, the largest faction within the Palestinian Liberation Organization. And the Black September group was a secret offshoot of Fatah. But is that enough of a connection?
Janet Van Brown says her boyfriend was killed because he was a non-violent public intellectual. And a senior Palestinian leader later said Zwaiter was energetically anti-terrorism. Zwaiter had been questioned by Italian police earlier that year over a Black September bombing. Sure, he was released afterwards, but was there any truth to the rumors of his terrorist connections? Maybe it wouldn't have mattered either way. Two decades later, the BBC spoke to Major General Aharon Yariv, who was part of Operation Wrath of God, and asked whether everyone on the list was linked to Black September and the Munich attack. He replied, "Not necessarily. Not necessarily at all. Some of them were linked to Munich, some of them weren't."
The phone call
Next stop for the Mossad agents, Paris, to track down the second person on their list. Mahmoud Hamshari is 33 years old. He has a PhD in history, a French wife, and a young daughter. He's also the Parisian representative for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO. But Israeli intelligence says he's running Black September in Western Europe.
In December 1972, Mahmoud Hamshari receives a phone call from an Italian journalist wanting to talk to him about a story she's working on. When he heads off to meet her, a Mossad team seizes the opportunity to sneak into his apartment and place a bomb under his telephone. Hamshari returns home, unaware of what's just happened. The Italian journalist then phones him again, and when she's sure it's him, she gives a sign to her colleague. A detonation signal is then sent down the phone line, and the bomb explodes. The Italian journalist is a Mossad agent.
Mahmoud Hamshari survives for a while before succumbing to his injuries in January 1973. Over the next few months, Mossad whittles down its kill list. A bomb under the bed, a shooting in the street, a hotel room blast. But then, one night in April 1973, Israel ups the ante, attempting to kill three people on the list in one go.
Operation Spring of Youth
Three Palestinian men made the mistake of living in almost neighboring apartment blocks in Beirut. January 1973, Beirut, Lebanon. A Canadian-born Yale man has just moved into a flat on the upmarket Rue Verdun in Beirut. She's in town to do some historical research. Her flat happens to be opposite a couple of apartment blocks where three high-ranking Palestinian officials live. The ones Mossad wants to kill.
The first is Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, who is said to have led operations planning for the Black September attack in Munich. The other two, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser, are both high-up leaders in the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Yale man spends a lot of time in her flat and she begins to notice the daily routines of people living around her: what time they leave for work, which neighbors travel with security guards, how late people switch off their lights to go to sleep at night. But it's not just innate curiosity that drives her to track her neighbors' movements. Yale man is being paid to notice this sort of stuff. She's an undercover Mossad agent doing months of target surveillance for this one operation.
Israel, April 1973. The future prime minister, Ehud Barak, is practicing walking in heels. The heels aren't especially high, but still they're a bit tricky. To pass as a woman, he also has a brunette wig and some makeup. Clothes-wise, Ehud Barak won't be wearing a fashionable '70s mini dress. You can't hide an Uzi under a mini. Instead, he'll put on some nice wide ladies pants to conceal an assortment of weapons against his body. He says he also carried a very stylish bag large enough to hold plenty of explosives.
Ehud Barak is yet to enter politics. Right now, he's a commando in the elite Sayeret Matkal unit and he's about to lead a secret mission into Lebanon. On the night of April 9th, 1973, speedboats carrying soldiers and a Mossad hit team pull up on a beach near Beirut. Undercover Mossad agents are waiting on land to drive them into the fashionable part of town. The commandos then head off on foot, looking for all the world like a group of tourists out for a night of fun.
It's now a few hours later, after midnight on the morning of April the 10th. The commandos want to get in and out of Lebanon as quickly as possible. So, they make their way to the apartments and place explosive charges on each man's front door. When their leader, Ehud Barak, gives the signal, all three doors are blown up and the commandos race in.
Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar and his wife hide in a room. A commando shoots them both dead through the closed door. In the second apartment, Kamal Nasser takes cover near a desk he's been sitting at. He shoots an Israeli commando in the leg before he's also killed. And in apartment three, Kamal Adwan gets out an AK-47 to defend himself, but he too is quickly killed. During the firefight, an elderly Italian woman is accidentally shot dead by the commandos when she comes out to see what's going on. The soldiers then quickly grab as many personal documents as they can find before fleeing. Back to their cars, back to their speedboats, back to Israel.
The Israelis named these attacks Operation Spring of Youth. The Palestinians call it the Verdun Massacre.
As we mentioned earlier, Ehud Barak, who led this covert operation in Beirut dressed as a woman, will go on to become Israel's prime minister in 1999 for the Labor Party. His election campaign calls for a two-state solution, supporting an independent state of Palestine. Barak later describes how he felt about the job ahead of him. He said, "I am ready. I do understand that it won't be easy, but I am determined to leave no stone unturned on the way to peace."
But what about assassinations as a way to peace? Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, who's written a history of Israeli targeted killings, says assassinations during this period did achieve a few things. They stopped most Palestinian terrorism outside the borders of Israel. He also thinks they probably saved Israel from very grave crisis. But in a broader sense, Bergman says they did nothing to help bring peace to the Middle East. He said, "Strategically, it was a complete failure."
The night of the raid
So, what about Operation Wrath of God itself? The campaign built a fearsome reputation for Mossad assassins, but did it achieve what it set out to do: punish those involved in the Munich Olympics attack? Well, there were three surprising names that Mossad never got to tick off their kill list. The actual Black September members who carried out the Munich attack, the ones who were set free in Libya after barely any jail time. One man is thought to have died of heart failure in the 1970s, but it's less clear with the other two. There are reports that one, or even both, could still be alive.
There was, however, one person on the kill list that Israel didn't give up on after accidentally killing an innocent waiter in Norway in 1973. Operation Wrath of God was scaled back for a number of years. The list sat there unfinished. But then in 1979, Operation Wrath of God returned for one more hit, a major one. The man they had been trying to kill when they botched the job in Lilahhammer, Norway. The man they nicknamed the Red Prince, Ali Hassan Salame.
Unfinished Business
That story is on our next episode of Assassins. Thank you for watching, my friend. If there's an assassination you'd like us to cover on the show, drop it in the comments.