How Europe covered up the assassination of Palestinians on its territory

On the morning of 8 December 1972, the phone rang in an apartment on the rue d’Alésia in the 14^th arrondissement of Paris. A man picked up the receiver: “Is that Hamchari speaking ?” asked a voice at the end of the line. “I’m the Italian journalist who got in touch with you”. No sooner had the man confirmed his identity than the bomb hidden under the little telephone table exploded. Seriously injured, he was rushed to the hospital, but he had time to answer the police and tell how he had been approached for an interview a few days earlier.

His testimony put an end to the rumour, widely circulated by the national press, that Mahmoud Hamchari, who had represented Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in France since 1969, had been killed handling explosives. He died of his injuries a few weeks later, on 9 January. He is buried in Paris, the Israeli authorities having refused to let his remains return to Palestine, the land of his birth.The police claimed to have no leads, whereas Hamchari’s Parisian friends and associates, some of whom were detained for questioning, accused the Israelis of the murder. In the days that followed, certain French newspapers strongly suggested the same¹.

What was not known at the time was the close collaboration between Israeli and European secret services, revealed for the first time by the Swiss scholar Aviva Guttmann in her book Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign(Cambridge University Press, 2023). Immediately following the September 1972 attack at the Olympic games in Munich², the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir set up a group assigned to assassinate the presumed leaders of the Black September Organisation which had claimed responsibility for the operation. These assassinations were to be carried out wherever the targets were found, including on the territory of countries considered allies. This had been known for many years, but the hitherto unpublished documents contained in this book go much further.

They reveal the existence of a group called the Club de Berne, set up in 1969 by the European secret services in order to exchange information. It was soon to include several other western countries, among them the USA and Israel³.

Ten assassinations in one year

The author explains :

"In October 1971, Israel suggested that a separate encrypted communications channel be opened to share warnings and intelligence about Palestinian terrorist activities in Europe. This channel sent cables under the code word ‘Kilowatt’. From there developed a fruitful cooperation mechanism. Kilowatt was used daily by the agencies to track Palestinian organisations and share intelligence about terrorist operational methods, planned attacks, weapons acquisitions, and innovations in terrorist techniques. All agencies provided timely replies to requests, especially when it was believed that a terrorist suspect was in their country.

The information on suspects (mostly in Europe) included, for instance, which hotel a Palestinian terrorist suspect had stayed at, what phone numbers they called, flight routes if applicable, address, passport, and anything else of relevance that could be found. In terms of the historical importance of the Club de Berne, this secret group hosted the first multilateral counterterrorism warning channel. Cooperation continued over decades and has developed into a cross-country near-institutionalized intelligence apparatus.”

Thus Mossad and Shin Beit received directly all the information they needed concerning the targets for their future assassinations, including those who were in Europe. And they were kept informed at every step of investigations, as is made clear by the messages concerning Hamchari.

In the space of a single year, ten assassinations took place in Europe, three of them in France. In chronological order: Wael Zouaytar (Italy, 16 October 1972) ; Mahmoud Hamchari (France) ; Hussein Abu Kheir (Cyprus, 22 January 1973) ; Bassil Koubeisi (France, 5 April 1973), Zaid Mouchassi (Greece, 11 April 1973) ; Abdel Hadi Nakaa and Abdel Hamid Shibli (Italy, 17 June 1973) ; Mohamed Boudia (France, 28 June 1973) and Ahmed Bouchiki (Norway, 21 July 1973). This last operation was a fiasco: Bouchiki⁴ was just a poor Moroccan waiter who had been mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, a member of the leadership of Fatah, who would be assassinated in Beirut many years later, on 22 January 1979.

“Contrary to the myth of Mossad as an omnipotent force, the agency relied heavily on European intelligence,” Aviva Guttmann asserts in an interview she gave to Haaretz⁵.

The goal is to liquidate the PLO

Bouchiki’s murder in the tiny Norwegian village of Lillehammmer led to the arrest of six members of the Israeli killer squad who would be given light sentences and discreetly set free before they were served. The investigation also brought about the dismantling of a vest network of safe houses in which the central role of Mossad was confirmed. These discoveries should have prompted a reopening of the investigation into the assassination in France of Hamchari, Boudia and Koubeisi: the PLO requested it but the French authorities refused, and cooperation with Israeli intelligence went ahead regardless.

The official pretext for these operations was to track down those responsible for the attack on the Israeli Olympic athletes, but as the author explains,

“a direct connection to the Munich massacre was no longer needed. Anybody found to be an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian armed struggle or actively involved in the preparation of terrorist events was a potential target of Mossad’s killing team.”

In cruder terms, it was hoped, absurdly, that by eliminating the leadership of the PLO, a fatal blow would be dealt to the Palestinian cause. And when the author writes of persons “involved”, what exactly does she mean ?

“With the Club de Berne files it becomes clear that for each Operation Wrath of God victim, Mossad held intelligence that showed they were directly involved in the planning and execution of terrorist operations, either as an active operative or in a supporting role.”

But can we consider the information supplied by Mossad to its opposite numbers as coming from a trustworthy source ? It claimed that Hamchari’s apartment, which he shared with his wife and their little girl, housed a cache of weapons for Black September. Hamchari was a diplomat, whose activities were carried out in broad daylight. His semi-official status was formally recognized by the French government with whom he had been negotiating for several months to spare France any of the actions carried out at the time by the Palestinian resistance abroad. The Hamchari case, as well as that of Wael Zouaytar in Italy⁶, show that Israel makes no distinction between political and military targets, as is demonstrated daily in its genocidal war against Gaza.

Dead for Palestine

A short documentary film, somewhat amateurish, Morts pour la Palestine(Dead for Palestine), which the Syrian Mamoun al-Bonni made as part of a thesis at Paris-8 University Vincennes, reconstitutes through interviews a portrait of Hamchari and other victims of Israel’s operations like the Algerian theatre artist, Mohamed Boudia. Among those interviewed is Jean Genet, whose 1970-1971 stay with the fedayin in Jordan, recounted in his masterpiece A Loving Captive, was facilitated by Hamchari. And also Mireille Beauvillard, an attorney who defended activists for the Algerian National Liberation Front. The film also recalls other attacks, in Beirut for example where the writer and journalist Ghassan Kanafani was murdered (July 1972) as were three PLO officials (April 1973).

Together with shots of Paris in black and white, several excerpts from radio newscasts illustrate the racism of the French media, whose basic assumption was that every Palestinian was a terrorist. In those years there was a growing number of murders of Arabs in France - an “epidemic” of what a more recent book calls “arabicides”⁷ – a few years after the end of the war for Algerian independence and immediately after the nationalization of the oil industry by the newly independent country. Already the hatred of Arabs was conflated with that of Palestinians.

“Useful idiots or accomplices?”

A nagging question runs through this book. By supplying, via the platform Kilowatt, information concerning the Palestinian groups, and by prioritising terrorist actions on their own territory, were French and European intelligence services Israel’s “useful idiots”, or conscious collaborators ?

As the author points out, the documents

"show a discrepancy between official European political condemnations of Israel and a continued secret support for its counterterrorism policy. Essentially, European capitals walked a tightrope between keeping good official relations with Arab states, publicly taking a very critical stance towards Israeli settlement policies, and all the while secretly helping Israel in its fight against the Palestinian armed struggle. The analysis of these secret Euro-Israeli ties advances our understanding of covert diplomacy and strengthens the view of intelligence agencies as actors in their own right, who pursue their own foreign policies that can be independent of official diplomatic relations.”

No wonder those murders remained unresolved.

The book will disappoint readers who expect revelations. The exchanges mostly confirm that the frame of reference (the “war on terror”) used to analyze the Middle East is utterly useless, that on the contrary it has a blinding effect, making the western services incapable of understanding the nature of Black September, its relationship with Fatah and quite simply the meaning of the Palestinian struggle. For them “the war on terror” was a “technical” campaign with no political content. The author herself is not immune to this simplistic reading.

As Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), then second in command of the PLO, explains: “Black September acted as an auxiliary of the Resistance, at a time when the latter was no longer able to fulfill completely its political and military tasks”, in particular on account of its expulsion from Jordan in 1970-71⁸.During 1973, it recovered from the setbacks it had sustained, gained a foothold in the occupied territories with the creation of the Palestinian National Front in 1973, and saw its struggle recognized by an increasing number of non-aligned countries or members of the Soviet camp. Even Europe began to take the Palestinian factor into account. The PLO then decided to abandon its “external operations”, outside of historic Palestine, a decision taken irrespective of the assassinations perpetrated by Israel.

But the Club de Berne did not disappear. As Aviva Guttmann explains,

"the mutual interests of all parties, even the ones who might not have agreed that their intelligence could be used for an assassination campaign, explain why Club de Berne cooperation also continued after the Lillehammer affair. It not only continued over the following decades, but also grew in scope and importance. It is today the most important informal counter-terrorism intelligence liaison between Europe and its partners ; only the cooperation code word changed from ‘Kilowatt’ to ‘Phoenix’ in the 1990s.”

Whether those who renamed it were simply ignorant or they had a well-developed sense of dark humour, the “Phoenix program” was the name of one of the secret operations which the United States conducted in Vietnam starting in 1969 to fight the civilian wing of the resistance, involving thousands of assassinations, forced disappearances and the widespread use of torture. It was copied from the counter-insurrection strategy initiated by the French army during what it called “the Battle of Algiers” (1957). From Algeria to Palestine by way of Vietnam, all colonial wars leave in their wake the same stench of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Translated from French by Noël Burch