The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with a number of other leading officials, in the first few hours of the Iran War has confirmed that assassination is a routine tool of Israeli policy. Over the past two years, Israel has successfully targeted the military and political leadership of Hizbullah, Hamas and the Houthis, serially eliminating officials almost as soon as they step into the shoes of their murdered predecessors. The targets don’t have to be high-profile figures. Last October, an Israeli airstrike in southern Lebanon killed two engineers, Ahmad Saad and Mustafa Rizk, employees of a development organisation run by Hizbullah, who were on their way to assess war damage to buildings and infrastructure. This was part of an ongoing strategy to target not only Hizbullah’s military arm but its civilian functionaries, an approach assiduously deployed against civilian infrastructure in Gaza, down to workers trying to repair the devastated water system. For Israel, it seems, there is no political problem that can’t be solved, at least in part, by the elimination of individuals.
The first group known for deploying assassination as a key instrument of political strategy was the medieval Ismaili sect known as the Assassins, who for centuries successfully targeted rulers across the Middle East until they were ultimately crushed by the Mongols. Political murder never went entirely out of fashion. It was favoured by groups such as the Social Revolutionaries in tsarist Russia, and was also used by militant Zionist organisations in Palestine, notably the Irgun and Lehi, which targeted British officials and others who stood in the way of the nascent Israeli state. Among their victims was Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish diplomat who, as UN mediator, drafted a peace plan deemed unacceptably favourable to the Palestinians. He was duly gunned down in September 1948 on the orders of one of Lehi’s leaders, Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir was subsequently recruited to take charge of Mossad’s first targeted killing squad. Emerging later from the shadows to enter politics, he rose through the ranks of Likud, becoming foreign minister in 1980 and prime minister three years later. When Shamir met the UN official Brian Urquhart for the first time, he greeted him warmly. ‘I am so happy to meet you,’ he said. ‘I have never dealt with the UN before.’ ‘Oh, but you have, foreign minister,’ Urquhart replied. ‘You dealt with Count Bernadotte, did you not?’
Amid many fits and starts, the Israeli assassination programme became steadily more elaborate and ambitious. For the proposed elimination of a single senior Palestinian fighter, Iyad Batat, in the West Bank in 1999, according to the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, commanders assembled a joint force consisting of no fewer than nine separate security agencies and units. In Rise and Kill First (2018), his encyclopedic history of the programme, Bergman reports that by the year 2000 Israel had launched some five hundred targeted killing operations. By the time the book came out, in 2018, it had conducted eight hundred more.
Israel’s use of assassination as a preferred policy tool has long been recognised, and even celebrated in fiction, for example in John Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl (1983), which featured an Israeli spymaster’s devious and successful plot to kill a Palestinian terrorist. One operation in particular caught the popular imagination: the hunting down of the perpetrators of the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage and killed by a militant Palestinian group calling itself Black September; most of the hostages died during a staggeringly inept rescue attempt by the German police. In response, the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, authorised Mossad to eliminate the organisers of the attack, a covert campaign called Operation Wrath of God. Beginning with the shooting of a young Palestinian, Wael Zwaiter, as he walked up the stairs to his apartment in Rome, the hit team killed nine people over the course of the next two years. Some were gunned down in the street; others were dispatched by bombs planted in homes or cars.
In July 1973, however, Mossad assassins shot a man in Norway whom they believed to be one of Munich’s chief planners, Ali Hassan Salameh. In fact, the victim was a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, who had been living peacefully in Lillehammer for the previous nine years and was killed as he walked home from the cinema with his Norwegian wife, who was seven months pregnant. A passer-by noted the licence plate of the getaway car; the killers didn’t immediately abandon it because one of them had been out buying kitchen appliances for his new house near Tel Aviv and didn’t want to leave them behind. The next day, members of the team were apprehended at the airport by Norwegian police. One of them, it turned out, was acutely claustrophobic and soon started talking after being taken into a windowless room for questioning. Others were carrying fake passports and compromising materials that led to the exposure of Mossad operations across Europe. Despite this fiasco, the reputation of Israeli intelligence only gained in lustre. Operation Wrath of God became a staple in print and on screen, culminating in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 movie Munich, nominated for five Academy Awards.
Aviva Guttmann now casts the affair in a whole new light. She makes clear that, far from acting alone, Mossad relied heavily on assorted European security agencies for intelligence on Palestinian activities. Not only did they often provide the intelligence Mossad needed to select its targets, they also helped confirm when those targets were in a location they could be got at. The Europeans could have had little doubt that they were participating in an assassination campaign conducted on their own territory, certainly not after the initial killings, which contemporary commentators soon surmised were probably the work of the Israelis.
The mechanism for the sanguinary cooperation was an organisation called the Club de Berne. An informal association of security agencies, mostly European but also including Mossad and the FBI, it was set up in 1969 and has operated without public oversight ever since. Official records of intelligence agencies’ communications with their foreign peers are rare. Delving into the Swiss national archives, Guttmann has unearthed a trove of the club’s counter-terrorist communications during its early years, a programme codenamed Kilowatt and conducted via encrypted telex. Thousands of messages charted in copious detail the movements of Palestinians and their plans for hijackings, bombings and other acts of terrorism.
Given that the plots chronicled in the Kilowatt reports frequently involved blowing up civilian airliners, sometimes with the assistance of unwitting dupes recruited to carry bombs onboard, it’s hard to criticise the efforts of the Europeans to nip them in the bud. But it is ironic, nonetheless, that the club played a vital role as a component of what was itself a terror operation. It was a tip from the West Germans, for example, that linked Zwaiter, the first victim of Wrath of God, to the Munich attack – though Bergman concludes, on the basis of the testimony of a former senior Mossad official, that Zwaiter had no connection to Munich.
Kilowatt also helped the Israelis keep abreast of local police monitoring of their own operations. When Italian police investigating Zwaiter’s killing enlisted the Kilowatt network to help find the culprit, there was ‘an element of absurdity’, Guttmann writes, ‘because among the partners who were supposed to help identify the murderer, was the murderer’. But members of the Club de Berne almost certainly already knew who the murderer was – including the Italian intelligence agencies, which had long enjoyed close relations with Mossad. So providing updates on the homicide investigation was just another favour among friends: Mossad learned some good lessons about the mistakes it had made, which would come in handy in the planning of subsequent killings. And by keeping Israel in the loop, the club was implicitly signalling that the assassinations could continue without undue hindrance from local law enforcement.
Operation Wrath of God is generally depicted as dedicated to avenging the Munich attack, which bestows a degree of moral clarity and precision on the assassination effort. But as Guttmann makes clear, after the second killing, of Mahmoud al-Hamshari, the target list was expanded beyond those supposedly connected to Munich to include anyone on Mossad’s list of enemies. The third victim, Hussein Abu-Khair, the PLO’s representative in Cyprus, apparently owed his place on the hit list to his role as liaison with the KGB, though Kilowatt did provide tenuous evidence connecting him to the planning of an attack to be launched from Cyprus. Accordingly, Khair, who took minimal security precautions and always stayed in the same hotel in Nicosia, was killed by a mattress bomb in January 1973. To emphasise their determination to prevent any co-operation between the Palestinians and the Soviets, Mossad killed Zaid Muchassi, Khair’s replacement in the liaison position, a few months later with another mattress bomb. Hamshari, killed in his Paris apartment by a telephone-triggered explosion, was suspected of planning the bombing of a Swissair plane that killed 47 people in 1970, but was also believed to be negotiating a non-aggression pact between the PLO and France, a relationship that Mossad was determined to forestall.
Salameh, a senior PLO operative, was one of Wrath of God’s highest-priority targets, partly because intelligence supplied by MI5 suggested that he had been one of the chief planners of the Munich attack. It was also MI5 which provided the photograph that convinced Mossad, incorrectly, that their quarry was in Lillehammer. As it turned out, Salameh wasn’t in fact the architect of Munich. That was Mohammed Daoud Oudeh, who in 1999 inconveniently published a memoir, Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich, revealing his role. Oudeh died of natural causes in 2010. Mossad had finally caught up with Salameh in 1979, killing him with a car bomb in Beirut. Guttmann doesn’t discuss his assassination, but it is the considered judgment of many, including the historian Kai Bird in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames (2014), that Salameh was murdered not just because of Munich, but also because his close relationship with the CIA made him a point of contact between Washington and the PLO, a connection not at all to Israel’s liking.
The existence of the Club de Berne wasn’t publicly acknowledged until 2004, when a press release from the Swiss Justice Department casually referred to a meeting that had just taken place to discuss counter-terrorism measures in response to the Madrid train bombings. Guttmann stresses the hypocrisies involved when a network operated by anonymous functionaries pursues what is in effect a covert foreign policy. Officially, the governments that supposedly control the European members of the club have always been critical of Israel’s settlement policies in the Occupied Territories, and Switzerland has been adamant in maintaining its policy of neutrality. Yet, as Guttmann notes, ‘the countries’ intelligence relations were excellent. Not one critical word was ever mentioned in Kilowatt exchanges.’ Despite public condemnation of the Lillehammer murder by Norway and other European governments, amiable co-operation among club members continued as before. Norway convicted and imprisoned five of the six Lillehammer team members the police had managed to catch, but they were pardoned and released after less than two years. Whether or not the political leadership in club members’ countries were officially informed of the Israeli campaign, they felt no reason to complain. Many had their own record of dirty work: the British with respect to Northern Ireland, the French in dealing with Algeria, the Italians with the Red Brigades.
Israel’s assassination programme would increasingly be treated as a model to be followed. Asked in 2005 if he had a problem with a state becoming an executioner, Avi Dichter, the retiring head of Israel’s internal security service, replied: ‘No. I’m telling you, foreign delegations come here on a weekly basis to learn from us, not just the Americans … the state of Israel has turned targeted prevention’ – a favoured Israeli euphemism for assassination – ‘into an art form.’
The US was to the fore in adopting the ‘art form’. After 9/11, enormous energy and resources were devoted to targeting prominent opponents such as the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein and the leading lights of al-Qaida. Rather than exploding mattresses, the weapons of choice were drones and laser-guided missiles, as well as elite units such as Delta Force and Seal Team Six, but the guiding mindset was the same. Occasionally, a dissenting voice suggested that the policy of targeting high-value individuals was counterproductive. A secret US army intelligence study in Baghdad in 2007 concluded that high-value targeting, ‘our principal strategy in Iraq’, had led to increased American casualties and should be discontinued – but the machine ground on. ‘Turns out I’m really good at killing people,’ Barack Obama remarked to aides after ordering a strike in 2011. ‘Didn’t know that was going to be a strong suit of mine.’ More recently, Donald Trump has gleefully posted videos of alleged Venezuelan drug traffickers being killed by American drones on his orders.
American efforts notwithstanding, Israel continues to lead the world in assassinations, carrying them out on an unprecedented scale in Gaza over the past two and a half years. The careful selection process employed in the days of Operation Wrath of God is a distant memory; victims in the tens of thousands have been selected and located with the aid of AI systems, which also provide instantaneous estimates of the number of civilians likely to die as the result of a strike. There has been no sign that Israel’s old partners in the Club de Berne, which has expanded and now has an operational headquarters in The Hague, have raised any objection. ‘If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it,’ a former senior Israeli military lawyer declared ahead of a previous assault on Gaza. ‘We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. [Now] it is in the centre of the bounds of legitimacy’ – as international acquiescence to the actions of Israel and the US against Iran has now demonstrated.