The Wrath of God

Neither Side ever officially admitted that the war was in progress. But the time of its outbreak can be precisely determined: It was 4:30 in the morning of September 5, 1972, when eight members of a Palestinian terrorist organization known as Black September slipped into the Olympic Village in Munich, killed two Israeli athletes and took nine hostage.

Before the day ended, those nine were dead, too. After the West Germans completely bungled a rescue attempt---among other errors, they deployed only five snipers, armed with bolt-action rifles, against eight terrorists, four of whom had automatic weapons trained on the hostages at the moment the rescue attack began---the hostages were shot by their captors at point-blank range while they sat bound and helpless in two helicopters on the nearby Fürstenfeldbruck air base. There were early reports that German bullets had killed them, but the slugs later removed from their bodies were of the type fired by Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles, those used by the Black September terrorists.

Black September is dedicated to one proposition: that there shall never be peace with Israel. And outrage has always been its stock in trade. During its shocking entry onto the world stage on November 28, 1971, when four gunmen shot down Jordanian premier Wasfi Tal in the foyer of Cairo's Sheraton Hotel, one of the killers knelt by the dying victim and lapped the blood streaming from his mouth. But it was Munich that put Black September squarely in the international spotlight. The world saw and heard more about Munich than any other terrorist act ever: Dozens of television crews, who were covering the Olympics, bounced the drama off a satellite for much of the globe to see. Yet the most important consequence of Munich has remained secret, because the war that began that day was totally different from the conflicts that have bloodied Israeli-Arab relations for the past three decades. It was not fought on the familiar killing grounds of the Middle East, with Israelis' storming the Golan Heights or waging huge tank battles in the Sinai. Instead, it was a quiet and intimate war that was fought in the stair wells and streets of Europe; the last engagement took place in a small Norwegian town that most people had never even heard of. The public, which read only an occasional news story about the killing of an Arab here and an Israeli there, had no way of fathoming the intensity and significance of the conflict. Yet for nearly 11 months, Israeli hit teams, which were called The Wrath of God, waged against the leaders of Black September a war of kill and counterkill that embodied the most uncompromising tenet of both Jewish and Arab cultures: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. And the secret war had secret consequences, which contributed directly to creating the situation that prevails in the Middle East today.

Given the magnitude and the audacity of the Arab attack in Munich, the Israelis were bound to strike back. But the reason they retaliated as fiercely as they did was determined in large measure by a man who was standing in the control tower that night at Fürstenfeldbruck, watching in horror and silent rage as the inept West German rescue plan miscarried. He was General Zvi Zamir, an army major general who was the chief of the Israelis' external intelligence agency, which is known as the Institute, or Mossad.

Earlier that day, after news of the Munich raid had reached Israel, Premier Golda Meir had summoned her chief ministers and advisors to a meeting in the subterranean cabinet room of the modernistic Knesset (Parliament) building in Jerusalem. Moshe Dayan, who was then the defense minister, proposed that he take a group of Israeli commandos to Munich. A few months earlier, Dayan had scored a great success by using commandos disguised as mechanics to overwhelm four Black September terrorists who had skyjacked a Sabena 707 to Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in an attempt to ransom imprisoned Arab guerrillas from Israeli jails. But Meir refused. Instead, she decided to send General Zamir to Munich as her personal emissary.

The day after the massacre, an embittered Zamir returned to Israel. It must have seemed a cruel irony to him that Israel had managed so effectively to contain terrorism even within the predominantly Arab areas seized during the Six-Day War in 1967, only to have the Arabs export the conflict to Europe. As the Israelis saw it, the European police were too spineless, too ineffectual to cope with determined armed terrorists, and the European governments did not want to take stern measures that would offend Arab nations, on which they depended for oil. "It was a desperate and desolate feeling to stand by the control tower at Fürstenfeldbruck and realize that nothing has changed," Zamir told friends. "Jews are still dying on German soil with their hands tied and no one cares."

Now, back in Israel, Zamir revived a question that for months had been debated in secret at the highest echelon of the nation's leadership: how to combat Arab terrorism abroad. Along with a small group of top-ranking military and intelligence officers, Zamir had wanted to organize special liquidation squads to carry a war of revenge to the leaders of Arab terrorism wherever they might be. But Meir had always resisted.

"You can't guarantee that someday there won't be a mistake," she would reply. "Someday, some of our people will get caught. Then, you'll ask me: What are we going to do?"

Until Munich, Meir had approved only one operation. It came after the Lod Airport massacre on May 30, 1972, when three Japanese Red Army gunmen, working on a contract from Black September, sprayed the airport arrival hall with bullets---killing 27 persons and wounding 78.

A few weeks later, four Israeli frogmen swam ashore to Beirut, where they were met by two Mossad agents who lived undercover in Lebanon. The agents guided the frogmen to an auto belonging to a man named Ghassan Kanafani, an official in the Palestinian Liberation Organization whom the Israelis believed to be deeply involved in Black September. In his auto, the frogmen planted a powerful explosive, similar to an American Claymore mine. The next morning, they were shocked to see that Kanafani was accompanied to his car by his 16-year-old niece. Nonetheless, when uncle and niece entered the vehicle, one of the Israelis activated the radio signal that detonated the bomb.

After the slaughter at Munich, Zamir renewed his request for expanded operations. This time Meir relented.

"Send forth your boys," she said.

Even as Zamir was finally receiving his go-ahead, Arab gunmen continued the offensive begun in Munich. Their next action came in Brussels, where the Mossad maintained a branch office. On the afternoon of September 11, Ophir Zadok, an undercover Mossad officer in the Israeli embassy, received at telephone call from an Arab double agent who said he had important information. A meeting was set for that evening in a Brussels (continued on page 82) Wrath of God (continued from page 72) restaurant. As Zadok approached a booth in the rear of the cafè, he was cut down by revolver fire and seriously wounded.

The war of kill and counterkill had begun, and the Israelis started to organize their forces to cope with it. To head the operation, they chose a lean, black-haired man in his early 50s known only as Mike. Mike was the director of the Mossad's special undercover branch in Europe, which, among other things, was charged with recruiting Arab diplomats and military attachès as Israeli agents. He was given the assignment of converting his branch into liquidation teams that would form the basic Israeli combat units in the war against Arab terrorism. Team members were to be Israelis who could operate unnoticed in Europe, posing convincingly as citizens of other countries, so that their activities could not be traceable to Israel. The Mossad would provide them with foreign passports: false ones forged by the Mossad's own shop, others borrowed from Israeli sympathizers abroad.

The hit team, as devised by Mike and other Israeli intelligence experts, was to be composed of 15 people, including a leader and his deputy. It would be divided by function into five squads:

• Aleph was to consist of two killers, each equipped with a weapon developed especially for the job by the Mossad. It was a long-barreled Beretta semiautomatic, which fired .22-caliber long-rifle ammunition. Contrary to popular belief, the .22 is not just a boy's gun. It is a highly potent weapon, and the Israelis had already done considerable research in adapting .22-caliber automatics for the guards aboard E1 A1 jetliners. The E1 A1 weapons fired a bullet with far less powerful powder loading than normal. Hence, if a bullet missed a skyjacker, it was less likely to puncture the skin of the aircraft. The Mossad also adopted the same bullets---in this case, to reduce noise and thus attract less attention.

• Beth: the protectors, guards of the getaway route. At least one of the Beths was to be a skilled driver, a graduate of the Mossad course in high-speed and evasive auto-handling techniques. Both Aleph and Beth squads were to be under a special prohibition not to mix with the rest of the team. The reason: If the killers or guards ever should be arrested, other team members should not be able to identify them, in case they, too, were caught.

• Heth was to be the cover for an operation. Composed usually of two people (most often a man and a woman, since a couple attracts less suspicion than two men), the Heth squad would rent apartments where other agents could hide, arrange hotel reservations, book rental cars and in general supply the necessary logistic support without provoking undue notice. For this function, only people who fitted perfectly into the European landscape should be picked.

• Ayin was to be a squad of six to eight persons assigned to track the victim, discover the optimum circumstances for his liquidation and provide a protective corridor through which the Aleph and Beth squads could withdraw.

• Qoph was to run the communications. Generally, there were to be two men: one to handle the communications with the squad in the field from a secret command post, the other to be responsible for communications between the command post and the Mossad central in western Europe, which, in turn, was to provide the link to the Tel Aviv headquarters.

The hits were to be planned as carefully as military operations; at a special base in Caesarea, replicas of planned assassination scenes were built so the team members could run through practice killings. All the members were instructed in the cardinal principles absolutely insisted upon by the Israeli political leadership: No Jewish communities abroad, no Israeli embassies, no diplomatic channels should be involved in the operations and only professional agents could be members of the liquidation squads.

Mike had no trouble finding killers. He could draw upon the elite branches of the Israeli armed forces, whose members are taught the ungentle art of silent assassination. He could also find them in the special Mossad units that take part in the elimination of troublesome enemy agents. Perhaps to his surprise, Mike even found a volunteer in, so to speak, his own bed. She was Tamar, a woman of exceptional beauty and wit. As a university student in Jerusalem, she had become a favorite with foreign diplomats and United Nations military officers. Because of those contacts, she was recruited by the Mossad and went to work for Mike in the intelligence service. At some point, she and her boss became lovers.

It was a classic bittersweet relationship between a young girl and an aging man, made more poignant by the hazards and restrictions of the profession. Mike, the aging spymaster, was headed toward retirement. But the last thing he wanted to do was to quit. As long as he remained a high-ranking intelligence officer, he belonged to the secret inner circle that played a vital role in running Israel. Abroad, where he traveled under other identities, he enjoyed the power of money, of directing operations, of doing important things. Certainly, Tamar was not an easy woman to please. Playful and willful, she was self-assured to the point of impertinence, confident of her charms to the brink of provocation. Mike must have feared that he could keep his high-spirited mistress only as long as he held a position of power and prestige.

After five weeks of training, the hit team was ready for action. By then, Mike's squads already had carefully selected their target: Wadal Adel Zwaiter, a 38-year-old Palestinian who served as a translator at the Libyan embassy in Rome. His major literary accomplishment was translating A Thousand and One Nights into Italian. The Rome police considered Zwaiter to be the representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Italy. The Israeli view was far darker. They regarded Zwaiter as the Black September chieftain in Italy and believed he had plotted the attempt to blow up an E1 A1 707 on a flight from Rome to Tel Aviv. In that incident, two young Arabs had presented a tape recorder as a going-away gift to two English girls whom they had briefly gotten to know in Rome. The tape recorder contained explosives wired to a barometric triggering device that would detonate when the plane reached a high altitude. Fortunately, the girls packed the gift in their luggage; and since the baggage compartments in E1 A1 jets are lined with armor plating, the plane managed to land safely after the explosion. Nonetheless, the Mossad wanted to teach Arab terrorists not to mess with E1 A1 by making an example of Zwaiter.

On the evening of October 16, two Israeli gunmen, waiting by his apartment, quickly pumped 12 bullets into the Arab's head and body. One of the slugs lodged in the book A Thousand and One Nights that Zwaiter was carrying in his coat pocket. Later, the getaway car was found abandoned on the Via Brassanone, about 300 yards from the scene of the killing, where the Aleph and Beth squads had switched to another auto. Wiped clean of fingerprints, the Fiat yielded only one piece of evidence: an unfired .22 cartridge, manufactured by a West German firm, whose shell matched the spent ones found in the vicinity of Zwaiter's body.

Through the Israelis had seized the initiative, the Arabs had at their disposal far larger forces and much more extensive facilities. The Arab combatants in the conflict were 200 or so members of Black September, who were young and generally well-educated Palestinians, often students or workers in western Europe, organized into cells. Black September, which had been founded in early 1971, had placed or recruited senior representatives in every major European city. Their main support came from Arab embassies. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan strongman who was Black September's major contributor, ordered his diplomats to render all assistance possible to the young terrorists, whom (continued on page 164) Wrath of God(continued from page 82) he greatly admired. As a result, the organization's main arms depot in Europe was located in the basement of the Libyan embassy in Bonn. If someone had dropped a match in the place, half of the West German capital would have gone up in smoke. Syrian and South Yemenite diplomatic missions were also ready to supply bogus passports and to vouch for falsified credentials. The Algerian consulate in Geneva was especially important. According to the Israelis, it was the command and communications center for Black September's operation in Europe.

As its top-priority targets, Black September concentrated on Israeli intelligence officers and the double agents they had managed to place in Arab ranks. Several months before Munich, Black September had kidnaped and executed five Jordanian agents in West Germany who were believed to be passing information to the Israelis. About a month after Zwaiter's death. Black September resumed the campaign against double agents by killing a Syrian journalist named Khodr Kannon, who was suspected of being a Mossad "plant."

The Israeli retaliation was swift. In December, Dr. Mahmoud Hamshari, Black September's representative in Paris, answered his telephone. The caller identified himself as "the Italian journalist" who had invited Hamshari for coffee at a nearby café the day before. "Is this really Dr. Hamshari?" the voice inquired.

"Lui-même," he replied ("This is he"). The next---and last---sound Hamshari heard was the high-pitched whine of an electronic signal transmitted through the telephone that triggered a bomb. A powerful explosive had been planted under his telephone table by Israeli agents while he was out sipping coffee with "the Italian journalist"---who most likely was Mike.

After Hamshari's death, the tempo of kill and counterkill accelerated. In late December, Black September invaded the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, taking several diplomats and their wives hostage. But after 36 nerve-racking hours, the terrorists lost their nerve and accepted a safe-conduct flight to Cairo. Next, the Israelis blew up Black September's chief contact man with Soviet intelligence just after he clicked off the light in a Cyprus hotel room. Two days later, Black September struck back at Baruch Cohen, a Mossad officer in Madrid whose assignment was to recruit Palestinian students as double agents. Cohen was headed for a rendezvous with one of his contacts in a sidewalk café; as he approached it, he sensed he had walked into a trap and reached for his gun. Before he could draw, he was shot and killed.

There was a merciful pause, but on March 1, 1973, Black September gunmen invaded the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum while a diplomatic-corps party was in progress. Their object seems to have been to scare nonsocialist Arab governments away from associating with Americans. In the ensuing operation, the terrorists inadvertently revealed their links to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had piously disavowed any knowledge of Black September. Responding to a radio request by the Black September terrorists for guidance, a P.L.O. leader in Beirut replied: "The organization orders, repeat orders, you to carry out Operation Cold Water on numbers one, two and three." The consequence: Two American and one Belgian diplomats were executed in cold blood. Obviously, the Arabs were ignorant of the fact that their transmissions were being monitored by Western intelligence agencies. According to Israeli insiders, P.L.O. chief Yasir Arafat then came on the circuit: "Brothers," he said in his easily recognizable voice, "I congratulate you and thank you. Long live Arab Palestine!"

Now Black September was on the offensive. In quick succession, Palestinian gunmen carried out three operations on Cyprus, where they killed an Israeli agent, attacked the home of the Israeli ambassador and unsuccessfully attempted to hijack an Israeli plane. In Rome, Black September agents murdered an El Al guard. Resorting to a new form of violence, they mailed---from post offices in Israel and the Netherlands---dozens of letter bombs to Israeli and American officials.

In a grim counterpoint, the Israeli hit teams fought back so effectively that in the space of only three months they dispatched their fifth to eleventh victims, Black September agents in Paris, Cyprus, Beirut and Rome.

Victim number 12 was a man whose role in Black September had puzzled the Mossad for many months. He was a debonair Arab named Mohammed Boudia, who lived in Paris and circulated mostly among artists and theater people. The Israelis suspected that he was important but had not been able to identify his exact function---until they seized secret Black September files during the raid in Beirut. There they collected the equivalent of three file cabinets of papers, some of which were lifted out by helicopter ambulance. Among other things, the papers revealed that Boudia was in charge of enlisting young Europeans as agents for Black September; his sexual prowess, apparently, made him especially adept at recruiting young women.

On the morning of June 28, 1973, as Boudia climbed into his Renault sedan after spending the night with a French girlfriend, an explosion blew his car apart. Sitting less than 100 yards away in a Volkswagen, peering through slits in the black masking tape on the window, were two very interested parties to Bou-dia's sudden departure. They were Mike and his boss, General Zvi Zamir.

Two evenings later, the war reached a new continent and an unsuspecting victim. As Colonel Yosef Alon, an air attaché of the Israeli embassy in Washington, stepped from his auto in the garage of his suburban home, he was killed by a volley of pistol fire. Although local police and the FBI failed to solve the murder, he was, in fact, shot by black-power gunmen on a $20,000 contract placed by a Black September representative in the U. S.

By now, despite their own losses, the Israelis had killed off most of Black September's top men and had driven most of the surviving Arab terrorist leaders into hiding. Still, they had failed to get the one they wanted most: Ali Hassan Salameh, the chief Black September planner and director of its European operations, who had been the mind behind the attack on the Olympic team. If the Mossad had a special reason for exacting revenge from Salameh, he, in turn, had equally persuasive motives, both of blood and of marriage, for carrying on the conflict against the Israelis. Ali Hassan was the son of a Palestinian guerrilla leader, Sheik Salameh, who had fought cruelly and effectively against the Jewish immigrants until the Haganah, the forerunner of the Israeli army, blew up his headquarters in 1948, killing him and many of his followers. His son Ali had married into the Husseini family, whose hatred of the Jews was legendary in the Arab world. His wife was a direct descendant of the mufti of Jerusalem, who during the Forties had been a virulent opponent of opening Palestine to Jewish settlers.

Ali Hassan Salameh was, in addition, handsome, sophisticated and extremely clever. Unlike most other Arab leaders, who had a tendency to run off at the mouth (victims of "the Arab disease," as even other Arabs derisively called it), he knew and treasured the value of secrecy. To guard against leaks, he would plan an operation in his own mind, not confiding the target to his agents until the very last moment---and then only their leader. Ali Hassan also nurtured a number of vices not uncommon to men, especially to those who live continuously in danger: He drank too much champagne, smoked too many Rothman's cigarettes and had a weakness for fast women.

During late 1972 and early 1973, as his fellow Black September leaders were dying of lead poisoning and explosions, Salameh prudently went into hiding in West Germany. At least six Israeli agents were assigned to find him, but he was a difficult man to track. About all they discovered was that he lived part of the time in Ulm and made frequent trips to Stuttgart and Frankfurt; in the latter city, he would disappear among the multitude of pimps, whores and drug pushers. He often switched disguises and identities, traveling on at least six different passports, including a French one that listed his birthplace as Corsica to account for his dark skin. To the best of the Israelis' knowledge, Salameh did not risk using the telephone or cables for Black September communications. Unlike his compatriots in the Khartoum episode, he was aware that electronic means were easily tapped by opposing intelligence services; he received information and issued orders almost exclusively through secret couriers who knew how to seek him out.

In early July, his trackers suddenly flashed the news that Salameh had begun to move. Finally, the break had come, and the staff at Mossad headquarters was exultant. They alerted a hit team stationed in Europe to track and kill him, naming the operation that would liquidate their 13th victim The Chase for the Red Prince.

After leaving his Ulm hideaway, where he had a German girlfriend, Salameh traveled to Paris and checked into a small hotel on the Left Bank. By placing a listening device in his room, the Israelis learned that he was planning a new terrorist spectacular---this time involving a skyjacking. But the Red Prince was too fast for them. Perhaps he sensed that he was being trailed, or maybe he was only following his tested survival technique of never remaining in one place for long. In any event, while the hit team was waiting to receive the go-ahead for the kill from Tel Aviv, Salameh suddenly left Paris. The Israelis tried to corner him in the northwest French town of Lille but failed. Still in pursuit, they picked up his tracks in Hamburg; again, he eluded them. As best they could tell, he seemed to be headed north---a direction that spelled trouble to Israeli intelligence. For more than a year, they had been picking up clues that Black September intended to carry out an attack in Scandinavia.

To their utter frustration, the Israelis had to admit that they had lost track of Salameh. For several days, the intelligence chiefs could only guess where he might surface again. Then on July 14, another break came: A message arrived from Geneva saying that Israeli agents had observed an Arab named Kemal Benamane being driven to the airport by a member of the Algerian consulate in a car bearing a CD license plate. The Israelis had always kept a close watch on the consulate. Benamane, who was a handsome, roguish Algerian in his mid-20s, had just married into one of the city's finest families. After wandering for several years in the Near East and eastern Europe, he had somewhat mysteriously appeared in Geneva in late 1972. Though he lived a hippielike existence, he managed to move easily among the Arab diplomatic set in Geneva. The Mossad believed that he was a Black September courier, ranking between 12 and 14 in the organization's hierarchy.

The Mossad trackers in Geneva watched Benamane board a plane for Copenhagen. Well and good, thought the chiefs of the Mossad in Tel Aviv. The second piece of the puzzle was falling into place. Benamane was undoubtedly carrying instructions from the Algerian consulate to Salameh. His trail would lead to the Red Prince. Tel Aviv alerted its agents throughout Scandinavia. When word came that Benamane had arrived in Oslo, the Mossad's three men in Stockholm were shifted to the Norwegian capital to trail him.

The Mossad, however, had a tactical problem: The hit team that had been pursuing Salameh through Europe was too dispersed, too exhausted to regroup quickly and resume the chase. Far from being discouraged, the Mossad leadership was secretly delighted. Unlike intelligence agencies and military commands in other countries, where the directors never take part in operations directly, the Israelis have a tradition of, as they put it, "leading from the front." So Mike enthusiastically began to recruit a hit team from among his own staff. Tamar would be one member. His principal deputy, Abraham Gehmer, volunteered to be the number-two man on the team. Virtually the entire staff followed Gehmer's lead; secretaries, desk officers and off-duty killers offered their services. So, too, did one of Israel's most beautiful and effective female agents, who happened to be in Tel Aviv at the time. Her real name was Sylvia Rafael, but she operated under the name Patricia Roxburgh, a Canadian woman whose identity had been usurped without her knowledge by the Mossad. Sylvia lived mostly in Paris, where she had an apartment on the Seine and supposedly worked as a free-lance photographer.

Since the hit teams had never before operated in Scandinavia, Mike urgently needed to find two people for the Heth squad, to establish covers and make the living and travel arrangements for the rest of the team. One likely candidate was among the three men already sent from Stockholm. He was a reserve member of the Mossad and a former Danish citizen called Dan Aerbel, whose family name originally had been Ert. Mike found the other candidate in Marianne Gladnikoff, 25, a plump and earnest Swedish girl who had immigrated to Israel two years earlier. She already had a security clearance, because she worked for the firm that handled the data processing for Israeli intelligence. Better yet, she had just started the evening course run by intelligence that would in a year's time qualify her for a tryout as an agent. Marianne was embarrassed that she had not gone through the military service required of Israeli young women. Therefore, when she was asked, "Are you willing to perform a service for the state of Israel?" she felt obliged to say yes.

On the evening of July 18, Mike's newly organized hit team, traveling in two groups, arrived in Oslo. One group, which included Marianne and an agent called Jonathan Ingleby, was instructed to check in at the Panorama Summer Hotel, where Kemal Benamane also was a guest. The next morning, Ingleby asked Marianne to help him with some shopping. They took a taxi to central Oslo, where, at different shops, Ingleby bought a package of modeling clay, a metal saw and a small file. Marianne guessed he was buying equipment for making a key but did not dare ask any questions. In fact, Ingleby was preparing to slip into Benamane's room, where he hoped to find papers containing some clue to Black September's intentions.

As the agents returned to the hotel, Abraham Gehmer, who was traveling under the fabricated identity of a supposed British schoolmaster, Leslie Orbaum, met them with bad news. Benamane had left. However, other Israeli agents had tracked the Arab to an Oslo railroad station, where he had bought a ticket for the resort town of Lillehammer, about 85 miles to the north. Now the hunt began in earnest. Within the space of a few hours, three autos carrying ten Mossad agents suddenly descended upon the little town.

The Mossad hardly could have picked a less promising scene for an operation. In the past, its hit teams had worked chiefly in large west European cities, where their presence had blended into the general urban hubbub. But Lillehammer is a clannish provincial town where people take notice of such things as out-of-town license plates. Furthermore, the inhabitants are accustomed to fair-haired and light-skinned Scandinavian tourists. The men of the hit team were predominantly swarthy in complexion, Semitic in feature. Sylvia and Tamar were so beautiful that they would have attracted attention anywhere; in Lillehammer, their Mediterranean coloring made them even more striking. The field of action was almost laughably small---at most, two miles square. Within that area, there were no crowded streets, no congested back alleys, no dark stair wells. Lillehammer was a clean and well-ordered little town of brightly painted clapboard houses, small shops, outdoor cafés and modern apartment buildings on the hillside behind tall fir trees.

Through the simple expedient of inquiring at the tourist-information office, the Israeli agents learned that Benamane had checked in at the Skotte, an inexpensive tourist home. However, he was not in his room and the agents were unable to find him that afternoon. Actually, their prey, bored with the limited diversions of the small town, had gone to Lillehammer's handsome indoor swimming pool, where, unbeknown to the Israelis, he had had an interesting experience. Just as he stepped from the sauna, he was approached by an Arab-looking man of about his own age.

"Parlez-vous français?" the man asked.

"Yes, I speak French, but why don't we converse in our mother tongue?" Benamane responded in Arabic.

In that manner, Kemal Benamane struck up a conversation with Ahmed Bouchiki, a waiter in a Lillehammer sanatorium.

The two young men, delighted at the chance to speak Arabic, began to talk animatedly. Both, they discovered, were practitioners of karate. They talked excitedly about their skills and their experiences. In the course of the conversation, Bouchiki explained that he was preparing to pass an examination to become a lifeguard and that he also gave swimming lessons. For his part, Benamane said that he was married to the daughter of a wealthy Geneva banker but that he was having quarrels with his father-in-law. For a bit of rest, he had come alone to Norway. Happy to have found a fellow Arab, he asked if they could meet later that evening.

"Yes," responded Bouchiki enthusiastically, "at nine at the Terrace Café," an outdoor restaurant next to the swimming pool. Benamane returned to his hotel for a nap.

Meanwhile, the Mossad was closing in. Marianne and another Israeli agent, who was operating under false French identification, using the name Raoul Cousin, were told by Mike to check in at the Skotte. After placing their suitcases in their room, they took seats in the hotel's small ground-floor television lounge, where they could watch for their quarry.

Benamane slept soundly---too soundly. He woke up with a start about ten o'clock, realizing he'd overslept his appointment with Bouchiki. Hearing the patter of rain outside, he consoled himself: Surely his new friend would not have gone to an outdoor café in that weather. Now wide awake and restless, Benamane went downstairs to the TV room, where he slumped into an easy chair a few feet from the two agents.

The Arab, nervous by temperament, quickly became bored by the film being shown on TV, Fishery East in the Mountains---a slow-moving story, told in Swedish, about the trials and tribulations of fishermen in a small Baltic coastal town. As it ended, the other guests went to their rooms, leaving only the three of them in the small lounge. For another 15 minutes, the Arab paged idly through periodicals before he, too, went upstairs. Marianne and Raoul waited awhile to see if he would come down again; then, after it appeared that their quarry had gone to bed, the two agents walked to the rendezvous point in the railwaystation parking lot, where they made a report to Mike.

Benamane's behavior puzzled the Mossad agents. Why would a courier travel all the way to Norway just to idle his time away? Presumably, he was simply waiting for the right moment to make his move.

The next morning, Marianne and Raoul overheard Benamane apparently asking the Skotte's receptionist about the times of trains to Oslo. They watched the departure of the 10:05 train, but the Arab was not among the passengers. So they returned to the Market Square, the team's meeting point that day, and sat down on some large curbstones. A short time later, they learned from Mike that Benamane had been spotted in the outdoor café of the Kronen Hotel about 300 yards away. But before Marianne and Raoul could reach the Kronen, the Arab disappeared again. About noon, Mike came once more to fetch them. This time he was excited. Benamane had again been located, he said. He was sitting in another outdoor café, this time in front of the police station. And guess with whom he was talking? An Arab!

In the minds of the Mossad agents, this had to be the climactic moment. After a 2000-mile trip and six apparently aimless days in Norway, Benamane evidently had made his contact. As the two Israeli agents approached the outdoor café, called The Caroline, they saw Benamane locked in conversation with a young and capable-looking man of his own race. A veteran Mossad agent, operating under the false identity of a Viennese businessman named Gustav Pistauer, had the two Arabs under surveillance. Marianne and Raoul joined him on a bench about ten yards from the table where Benamane and his new acquaintance were talking. Marianne, fearful that Benamane might remember her from the previous evening, tried to avert her face.

Meanwhile, Pistauer was staring intently at the Arab who sat next to Benamane. In his cupped hand, the Israeli agent held a small picture, and his glance darted continually from the photo to Benamane's companion and back to the photo. "Is that the same man?" he asked in a low voice, turning the picture toward Marianne and Raoul. It was an enlargement of an amateur snapshot, showing a young Arab from his waist up; a white house was in the background. The man in the photo was Ali Hassan Salameh.

Marianne pointed out that the man in the photo did not have a mustache; the Arab sitting with Benamane did. Pistauer shrugged off that objection; mustaches can wax and wane. But Raoul, too, was not convinced the man in the café and the one in the picture were the same. It was difficult to make a definite judgment. Both men were in roughly the same age group---late 20s or early 30s. Each had a full face, a heavy growth of hair and long sideburns. There was one seeming difference: the shape of the eyes. On the small enlargement, Hassan's eyes appeared to be almond-shaped with a slight downward angle. The eyes of the man here in Lillehammer were olive-shaped with no pronounced downturn. But then, the picture was small and not especially sharp. After 10 or 15 minutes, Pistauer came to a conclusion: This was the same man. True to the Mossad's expectations, Benamane had led the agents to Ali Hassan Salameh.

In fact, Benamane's conversation partner was, of course, Ahmed Bouchiki, the aspiring lifeguard. He and Benamane had met again quite by accident. Benamane, after having been spotted by the Mossad in the Kronen's outdoor café, had wandered down the main street until he came to The Caroline. There, he happened to recognize a Frenchman he'd met the previous day, one of Bouchiki's swimming pupils who worked as a dishwasher in Lillehammer. Shortly after Benamane had taken a seat at the Frenchman's table and stuffed his well-used pipe with Dunhill tobacco, Bouchiki rode by on a bicycle. Spotting his friends, he stopped and went over to them.

Excited to see Benamane again, Bouchiki began to talk rapidly in Arabic. After several minutes, the Frenchman, feeling left out, asked him what they were talking about.

"Oh, just nonsense," Bouchiki replied. Out of politeness, the two Arabs then switched to French. Observing the exchange from a distance, the Mossad agents imagined that the animated conversation centered on plans for a terrorist attack.

But what Bouchiki was saying was that he liked the leather jacket that Benamane was wearing; he asked if Benamane would buy him one just like it when he returned to Switzerland. Also, would he send him some records of Arabic music, which he was unable to find in Norway? Benamane replied that he would be delighted to give him a leather jacket and the records as presents, but Bouchiki refused. He would accept them only if he could give Benamane the money in advance. Benamane demurred, saying he would not accept the money before he made the purchases.

So Benamane and Bouchiki wrote down their addresses on scraps of paper and exchanged them. When the Frenchman said he had to leave, Benamane shook his hand and delivered himself of a mysterious farewell: "If you see somebody that's black, that's me!" he said.

Bouchiki also had to leave, but before saying goodbye, he recommended the Victoria Hotel in Lillehammer as a good place for Benamane to have lunch. Then, climbing onto his bicycle, he pedaled away. Oddly, none of the Mossad team followed him. They did, however, trail Benamane, only to lose him near the Victoria. After lunch, they spotted him again, as he collected his belongings at the Skotte and caught the 2:10 train to Oslo.

On his arrival in Oslo, Benamane took a taxi to the Stefan Hotel, a modest establishment run by a missionary organization. Operating on the assumption that Benamane would return to Oslo that day, Sylvia, Aerbel and Gehmer had driven down earlier from Lillehammer. They followed him as he went out to buy a copy of Le Monde at a nearby kiosk and as he ate dinner in a self-service restaurant behind the Parliament building.

After Benamane returned to his room, Gehmer went to make a phone call. He returned to the shakeout in front of the hotel with an urgent message from Mike: Benamane no longer was "interesting." They should return to Lillehammer as quickly as possible; the other Mossad agents had located the man with whom Benamane had made contact.

The next episode remains an unresolved mystery. According to Kemal Benamane, he spent part of the evening at an Oslo night club and the rest in the hotel, trying to telephone his wife in Geneva. She was not at home: Benamane suspected that she was out with a Hungarian artist of whom he was jealous. While waiting to get through to his wife, Benamane chatted with a Moroccan who was night porter at the hotel. Finally, after midnight, his wife answered the telephone. He scolded her for not being at home earlier and then asked her to have some friends in the Algerian consulate pick him up the next afternoon at the Geneva airport, since he did not have enough money to take a cab to their apartment.

The version obtained later from confidential Israeli sources runs quite differently. According to that account, Mike's telephone message to Gehmer, which was relayed through a communications center set up in the Oslo apartment of an Israeli diplomat, was, in fact, a ruse. Mike wanted to get the other agents out of the way so he could talk with Benamane alone. The rest of the Mossad team believed Kemal Benamane was a courier for Black September. Only Mike knew that he was a double agent who had been kidnaped and forcibly recruited by the Mossad in Switzerland. "A bullet or your cooperation," they had told him.

Nobody likes a double agent. You distrust him even when he is apparently playing your game; and when he has exhausted his usefulness, you are not sorry to see him die. Sometimes you kill him yourself, or you arrange for the other side to learn about his duplicity so it can do the dirty business.

At some time and some place that evening in Oslo, the Israeli insiders say, Benamane met with Mike. Unconvinced that Kemal had fingered the correct man, Mike argued that this Arab with the mustache, whoever he really might be, obviously knew his way about Lillehammer and did not attract undue attention. Could Ali Hassan Salameh so quickly have blended into the Norwegian landscape? But, again according to the Israeli version, Benamane was adamant.

"That man is Hassan Salameh," Benamane supposedly insisted. "He is the one in Black September who gives me my orders."

As he awoke on the morning of July 21, Ahmed Bouchiki had no way of knowing that he had become the target of a killing machine. Bouchiki was far removed from the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He felt very content to have found a pleasant corner of the world in Norway. Few Arabs had ventured so far north, making him something of a rarity. Jobs were easy to find. So, too, were girlfriends, intrigued by his dark looks.

Nothing much ever happened in his life. He had spent most of the past eight years among the pots and pans of Norwegian kitchens. He tended to drift from job to job, usually earning no more than $3000 a year. His two main interests were karate and conversation. Engaging, open and animated, he brought to Lillehammer's coffeehouses the Arab love of sitting and chatting endlessly with friends about inconsequential topics.

In recent months, Bouchiki had become a more settled person. He liked to confide to friends how happy he was finally to have found the woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life. She was Torill Larsen, a Lillehammer girl who worked as a lab technician in the regional hospital on the hillside. When they had married on February 10, 1973, Torill was already pregnant. Now, in late July, the otherwise slender Torill, seven months along, looked as if she might give birth any moment.

On that particular Saturday morning, Ahmed, who had the day off, was alone. Torill had gotten up early to work the Saturday shift, from 7:30 to 10:30 A.M., in the hospital laboratory. Eager to pass his lifeguard exam, Ahmed decided to get in some practice time and headed toward the swimming-pool building, where his father-in-law was the administrator. On his way, he stopped off for coffee at the Kronen's outdoor café. There the Mossad agents, having been put on full alert by Mike---who had returned from Oslo early that morning with Tamar---spotted him.

After finishing his coffee, Bouchiki strolled southward along the main street and his Mossad trailers soon lost him. To soothe their disappointment, Marianne and Raoul, who were among the shadowers, popped into a café for coffee and pastry. They had just taken a table when Raoul suddenly caught a glimpse of Bouchiki on the street outside. Bolting to his feet, he told Marianne to report that the Arab had been seen. Then he dashed off in pursuit. Marianne hurried to Mike's command post in the railroad-station café. A few minutes later, Raoul rushed in. The Arab, he said, had gone into the swimming pool. Mike ordered the team to seal off all exits.

In the minds of the Mossad agents, the diabolical Hassan Salameh undoubtedly was planning to meet a courier or an accomplice in the pool. Only yesterday, they had seen him receiving messages, exchanging pieces of paper with Benamane, the Black September courier. Now the Israelis assumed Salameh would be forwarding instructions to a terrorist squad, probably already hidden somewhere in Norway. If that message got through, a new outrage against Israel would take place.

Mike instructed Marianne to go into the pool as quickly as possible and observe the Arab, see whom he met and try to overhear their conversation. One of the men dashed into a clothing store on the main street and bought her a yellow bikini.

"Indecently small," objected the buxom Marianne, and she used up extra minutes at the swimming-pool office to rent a modest one-piece blue suit. When she finally entered the pool area, she saw the Arab standing in the shallow water, talking with a man who appeared to be a European, about 30, with a full beard.

Marianne dived into the water and began to swim back and forth, each time edging a bit nearer to the two men. She swam so close that she almost splashed water on them, but the pool was filled with noisy children and she could make out only that the conversation was in French. She could not catch the gist of it. Soon the men headed for the locker room, still locked in conversation.

Changing into her street clothes, Marianne went outside to report her findings. When the Arab came out, he was accompanied by the bearded man and his girlfriend, a young Scandinavian woman. Raoul, Dan Aerbel and Sylvia followed the trio down the main street, but Marianne, feeling weary, returned to her hotel and fell asleep.

Bouchiki and his two companions were on their way to the Bergsengs Café, a combination café and store in the center of town, where they met Torill for coffee. Then, at 12:35, Ahmed and Torill boarded a bus for the ride uphill to their apartment. They were followed by at least one Mossad car. The agents saw the Bouchikis step from the bus at a stop in front of two identical nine-story, red-brick apartment buildings that stood among tall fir trees about two thirds of the way up the hill in a residential area called Furubakken. The nearby hospital, where Torill worked, had built the apartments for its personnel.

Believing they had finally cornered their prey, the Israelis were determined not to let him slip away. Under the direction of Abraham Gehmer, most of the team was summoned to Furubakken, where five lookout stations were established to cover all exit routes. Station one, the closest observation post, was located in a driveway directly across the street from the Bouchikis' apartment house. For communications, walkie-talkies were handed out and each car was assigned a call number. Bored and restless, some of the agents began toying with the walkie-talkies. A passer-by, curious about the strange autos parked in the area, noticed an antenna jutting from one of the car windows.

About two P.M., Raoul drove down the hill to fetch Marianne. The Mossad agents were curious why the people entering and leaving the two buildings were predominantly young women in white uniforms. Since Marianne could speak the language and looked Scandinavian, she should check out the buildings and try to find Arab-sounding names on the doors. The assumption was that Salameh would be hiding under a false identity. Once inside the building, however, Marianne evidently became flustered. In one of the buildings, the name Bouchiki was listed both on the directory in the foyer and upstairs on the door of apartment 86, but she missed it. She did note the large number of women's Christian names on the directory and told her teammates that the buildings must be a nurses' home.

The Mossad agents made no further effort to locate the apartment in which their quarry might be hiding or to discover his cover name. Nor did they make any attempt to check further into his identity to prove beyond doubt that the man whom Pistauer had identified as Hassan Salameh was, in fact, the Black September leader. In the hierarchy of the Mossad, most team members were lowly grunts accustomed to being ordered about---go there, check that, wait here, follow him. It was not their job to question orders.

As the hit-team members yawned and chatted in their cars under the peaceful fir trees of Furubakken, they could not have foreseen the urgency and hysteria building in Tel Aviv. Nor could they have imagined the maelstrom of developments into which they were being drawn.

Less than four hours after Pistauer made the identification of Ahmed Bouchiki as Hassan Salameh, the skyjacking that the Black September leader had been plotting actually went into action. At 3:42 that afternoon, a Japan Air Lines 747 carrying 123 passengers lifted off from Amsterdam, bound for Tokyo, with a stopover in Anchorage. The jumbo jet had been airborne only 30 minutes when it suddenly was seized by a band of Arab and Japanese terrorists. True to standard terrorist procedures, the skyjackers told the ground controllers that they were changing the call signal of the flight. From now on, the plane would respond only to "Operation Mount Carmel."

For Israeli intelligence, the new call signal conjured up the ultimate nightmare. Haifa is built at the foot of Mount Carmel, and for months, the Mossad had been picking up indications that Black September was planning a new "spectacular" that would surpass even Munich in horror. The plan called for crashing a skyjacked jetliner onto an Israeli city. Israeli intelligence chiefs chose not to share their alarm with the rest of the world. They were apprehensive that the disclosure of the plan might prompt Black September into putting it into action. As bizarre as the threat might seem, Israeli leaders regarded it as real and immediate.

It was precisely this fear that had led five months earlier to the tragedy over the Sinai. Blinded by a sandstorm, the French pilot of a Libyan 727 had over-flown Cairo airport and blundered into Israeli airspace. Aware of the rumored Black September plot, Israeli authorities suspected that the plane would crash, kamikazelike, onto an Israeli city; they ordered it shot down, causing 106 deaths. After realizing their error, they preferred to keep silent about the true reason for having resorted to such drastic action.

If the Libyan episode had been a mistake, the JAL skyjacking certainly looked like the real thing. As the big plane turned south and headed toward the Middle East, the terrorists of Operation Mount Carmel demanded the release of Kozo Okamoto, the survivor of the trio of Japanese Red Army gunmen who had sprayed their fellow passengers with gunfire in the Lod massacre. As the plane passed over Cyprus, the hijackers broadcast a message to Nicosia control: "We are determined to fight imperialism unto death." Then Operation Mount Carmel winged east---toward Israel.

Armed with air-to-air missiles, Israeli Phantoms streaked upward to intercept the 747. Their orders were to shoot down the jumbo as soon as it reached Israeli airspace. Mercifully, it flew slightly north of the Israeli border and tried to land at Beirut, but permission was refused. It was also unwelcome at Basra and Bahrein but finally was allowed to put down at the tiny Persian Gulf sheikdom of Dubai.

Why the stopover? To senior Israeli officials, the most logical assumption was that the terrorists would free the passengers and crew at Dubai. Then Mount Carmel would lift off again, this time bound for Israel. The Israelis suspected that among the terrorists was a pilot, recruited most likely by the Japanese Red Army, who at the last moment would take over the controls and place the huge craft in a power dive for Haifa.

Neither the Israelis nor any other outsider had any way of learning what really was happening aboard the 747. The leader of the operation was a woman traveling on a forged Ecuadorian passport who gave her name as Katie George Thomas. Actually, she was an Iraqi, the secretary to a leading Arab terrorist. Salameh, ever secretive, had confided the operation's plans only to her, and she had told none of the other agents about the ultimate goal of the mission. Moments after the 747 was airborne, Katie took a seat in a luxurious armchair in the first-class lounge on the upper deck and put her purse on the floor beside her. As the JAL steward poured champagne, Katie inquired how she could swivel the chair and the steward, seeking to be helpful, depressed the lever that allowed it to turn. As the chair rotated, Katie realized she was leaving behind her purse, in which she had secreted a hand grenade. Abruptly reaching back to retrieve it, she accidentally dislodged the grenade's pin. As she put the handbag on her lap, an explosion shredded her body.

Her companions went ahead with the skyjacking, though Salameh's plan died with Katie. But the Israelis, of course, did not know that the threat had been lifted in such an improbable manner. They did not relax their alert until the plane, after waiting aimlessly for three days at Dubai, flew to Benghazi, where the skyjackers blew it up.

It was on the afternoon of the skyjacking that Mike made three crucial calls from the post office in Lillehammer to the team's secret communications head-quarters in Oslo, which was manned by Mossad agent Zvi Steinberg. The first two calls took place at 2:50 and three P.M., and most certainly they must have dealt with the alleged discovery of Hassan Salameh in Lillehammer. Steinberg relayed the information to the Israeli embassy in Oslo, where another Mossad agent encoded it and radioed it to Tel Aviv. The message was beamed to the big Mossad electronic receiving facility just north of Tel Aviv.

Hence, just as Israeli intelligence and military chiefs were tensing against the expected attack by "Mount Carmel," a top-secret flash arrived: Hassan Salameh had been found by Mike's team in Lillehammer. It was a moment of incredible drama. At the very height of his greatest threat to Israel, Hassan Salameh had been delivered into the hands of The Wrath of God. This time, decreed the Israeli leaders, there should be no delays. Their order to Mike was curt and clear: Get Hassan Salameh, and get him fast.

As if the orders from Tel Aviv were not explicit enough, there was an even more immediate pressure on Mike in the person of his boss. General Zvi Zamir, who ten months earlier had watched in horror the tragic shoot-out at Fürsten-feldbruck, had come to Norway for the final act. Using the name Tahl, he had checked in Friday evening at the Esso Oldrud Autorest, a motel on route E-6 about 40 miles south of Lillehammer.

By three P.M. Saturday, the Israeli liquidation operation was moving toward its last phase. At the Oppland Turisten Hotel on the southern edge of Lillehammer, a dark-green Mercedes braked to a stop on the gravel drive. Three purposeful men climbed out; they were Jonathan Ingleby and the two Beth guards, who went under the assumed identities of Gérard Laffond, a Frenchman, and Rolf Baehr, a West German. They told the receptionist that they wanted rooms for two or three days.

Meanwhile, back on Furubakken, the other agents continued to yawn and chat their way through a thoroughly boring day. By late afternoon, they had become very hungry. Leaving Raoul and Marianne on watch in a white Mazda, the others drove to the café near the railroad station.

They had left too soon, for a few minutes later the object of the hunt stepped from the apartment building. Accompanied by his pregnant blonde wife, the Arab started to walk downhill. Raoul asked Marianne to drive to the café and alert Mike that Hassan Salameh had left his hiding place. Marianne protested that she did not know how to drive the Mazda. Raoul flew into a rage, yelling and shaking his fist. Marianne, face flushed, was on the verge of tears. As they argued, the Arab and his woman strolled past. Talking and laughing, they took no notice of the quarreling couple. Finally, Raoul bolted from the car, slammed the door and stalked off down the hill in pursuit of the man he fully believed was Hassan Salameh.

At just about the same moment, Mike made a call to Oslo and was given the final order from Tel Aviv: Carry out the killing that very evening. It was sooner than the team members had anticipated and they quickly began to check out of their hotels.

At the Oppland, Ingleby approached the reception desk. "Please give me the bill," he said in his best British accent.

"Are you leaving?" asked the woman clerk incredulously. "We thought you were going to be with us for a couple of days."

"No, we have to go," he replied evenly.

When the bill was handed to him, Ingleby barely bothered to look at the sum. Opening a large black case, which undoubtedly also contained his murder weapon, he took out a thick was of money and peeled off several hundred crown notes.

Meanwhile, Mike and Tamar were checking out of the Victoria, where they were registered as Madame and Monsieur Edouard Laskier. Since Mike was posing as a Frenchman, he felt compelled to put on a Gallic performance to explain the abrupt departure. "Oh, you know these Frenchwomen!" he complained to the receptionist. "They are impossible! I want to stay, but she is restless and wants to move on," he said, throwing up his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. "What can you do with these women?"

All the time he was settling the bill, "M. Laskier" continued to shake his head. "Ma femme! Ma femme!" he sighed, as Tamar, wearing a cap against the threat of rain, walked from the lobby and climbed into their car.

After his spat with Marianne, Raoul trailed the Arab and the pregnant woman to Lillehammer's only cinema, which is located just below the main street. The feature that Saturday evening was Where Eagles Dare, a mission-ridiculous film about the World War Two exploits of Allied commandos who supposedly free a captured American general from a Nazi mountaintop castle, committing all sorts of mayhem in the process.

At 10:35, as the movie ended, Ahmed and Torill had no inkling that they were stepping into a plot even more improbable than that of the fiction they had just watched. They left the cinema in a great hurry, because they had only two minutes to catch the bus at the stop in front of the Bergsengs Café. If they missed it, they would have to wait 40 minutes for the next one; Torill, burdened by her big belly, did not feel like making the long climb home on foot. As the Bouchikis rushed diagonally across the Market Square toward the main street, they were trailed by Gehmer, Aerbel and Marianne.

At that moment, Sylvia Rafael, dressed in a white safari suit, drove a white rented Peugeot to the vicinity of the bus stop. As Torill and Ahmed climbed aboard the bus, Sylvia picked up her walkie-talkie.

"He is on the bus," she said.

At 10:48 P.M., the bus reached the Bouchikis' stop. As they crossed the road toward their apartment building, Torill noticed a car about 100 yards uphill, its parking lights glowing in the twilight of the Norwegian summer evening. The car started to glide very slowly downhill as Torill and Ahmed, walking hand in hand on the edge of the road, climbed up toward the apartment building. The approaching car almost grazed Ahmed as it passed. Seconds later, they were startled by the sound of braking wheels crunching gravel as the auto, which had traveled only a few yards past them, came to an abrupt stop. Instinctively, Ahmed and Torill wheeled about. They saw the car doors fly open on both sides and two persons jump out. The man who came out of the right front door was tall, lean, with dark hair brushed forward; he wore a checkered coat. The other person, who sprang from the left rear door and came around the back fender, was smaller, had on dark clothes and some sort of head covering. They raised pistols with strange, long barrels like the silencers one sees in movies. Ahmed saw the weapons trained on him. "No!" he cried. Without saying one word, the killers opened fire.

In moments of incomprehensible horror and anguish, the human mind often records odd things. Standing only one yard from her husband as slugs tore into his body, Torill was impressed that the firing did not make more noise. She heard only a pop-pop sound, no louder than the explosion of small firecrackers. She could tell the pistols were shooting only by the little tongues of flame dancing from the ends of the barrels.

Momentarily frozen by fright, Bouchiki stood facing the killers. The man in the checkered jacket remained by the open car door, firing from a distance of four yards. The other killer opened fire from about the same distance. Both were aiming at the largest target---Ahmed's torso. Four slugs, grouped within a six-inch circle, tore into his belly, eating a hole in his cable-knit Danish sweater.

Perhaps it was the burn of the bullets that snapped Bouchiki into action. He turned uphill and tried to run but was too severely wounded. After one or two steps, he fell to the road. Even as he was going down, one bullet grazed his skull and ricocheted into the concrete foundation of the apartment house. Another bullet caught him below the ear, boring to the base of his brain.

As Bouchiki sprawled on the road, the bullets fired by the assassins tattooed his back with distinctive marks. Those from the gun of Jonathan Ingleby, who continued to stand beside the car, left oval wounds reflecting the slanting angle of fire. Ingleby's shots struck Bouchiki's back, tearing into heart, lungs and kidneys. The other killer was Tamar. She moved forward within two yards of Bouchiki and pumped bullets into his prone body. Her shots made small round punctures, indicating a direct angle of fire. From a coldly professional standpoint, the shooting was pretty fair. The Berettas carried 14 bullets, and 14 bullets had hit Bouchiki. The one that ricocheted off his skull left two holes. Six slugs remained lodged in his body. Seven others, in spite of their light powder loading, ripped through his flesh and exited on the other side. Beneath his riddled body, three large pools of blood quickly began to form on the gravel road.

Israeli assassins are taught to get their shots off fast, and the trigger action of the Berettas had been adjusted to facilitate quick shooting. The entire execution took no more than 10 or 15 seconds. Then Tamar and Ingleby threw themselves into the auto, the bang of the slamming doors blending into the howl of an overrevving engine. Jamming his foot hard on the accelerator, Rolf Baehr barreled the white Mazda down Furubakken, the wheels kicking up loose gravel.

Torill, cowering on the road, watched the white car disappear. Then she saw a dark auto approaching from the opposite direction. It came to a stop beside her husband's body and the man at the wheel looked out. It was Mike, making certain that his killers had accomplished their mission. Satisfied, he pulled away. Seconds later, he spoke into his walkietalkie. "They took him," he said. "All cars go home."

While an ambulance was being called to fetch the mortally wounded Bouchiki, the hit team was making its getaway. At a rendezvous point a few miles south of Lillehammer, the cars halted for Raoul to collect the walkie-talkies. Sylvia, now sitting in the front passenger seat of the white Peugeot, handed her set through the window. At that moment, Jonathan Ingleby strolled over.

"How did things go?" Sylvia inquired.

"A job is a job," he replied.

Throughout the greater part of the world, murder and mayhem have become so commonplace that it is almost impossible for outsiders to comprehend the impact, the indignation Bouchiki's killing caused in Lillehammer. In Rome or Paris, the death of an Arab waiter would have passed unnoticed and unmourned. But in a small Norwegian town, where there had not been a murder for 40 years, the reaction was different. The townspeople, accustomed for so long to safety and solitude, felt the intrusion of a brutal and alien outside world.

Not surprisingly, Lillehammer was unprepared to cope. The radio in police headquarters had been broken for 11 days and still had not been repaired. The headquarters could neither flash an alert to other police stations in the area nor even communicate with its own cars. In fact, in the minutes following the shooting, a Lillehammer police car was on patrol in the town's southern outskirts and, conceivably, might have been able to stop one or more of the Israeli autos. But, of course, the patrol received no message. The hit team left Lillehammer unnoticed, racing southward toward Oslo along the main highway, route E-6.

It took the Lillehammer police a full hour to reach police in the neighboring towns by telephone with the request that roadblocks be established on all routes leading from the area. Based on reports by Mrs. Bouchiki and a few other witnesses, the Lillehammer police alerted the other forces to be on the lookout for a white Mazda.

In the town of Hamar, 40 miles to the south, the call was received by a young deputy sheriff, Per Erik Rustad. Blue police light flashing, Per drove as fast as his VW could manage to set up a roadblock at a junction of E-6 located, ironically enough, almost directly in front of the motel where General Zamir had spent Friday night and most of Saturday. As Rustad brought the VW to a screeching stop, he and two companions piled out and sprinted toward the highway.

Standing on the edge of the road, Per signaled the oncoming cars to slow down. The first three drivers flashed by without paying the slightest attention. But the driver of the fourth car---a white Peugeot---hit the brakes. At that instant, Per caught a glimpse of a lovely young woman in the front seat. "What a beautiful girl," he thought. She looked directly at him and must have been favorably impressed, too. For a second, their eyes locked and, as the car passed, she turned her head to maintain the contact. Sylvia Rafael looked at the young sheriff for a bit too long. Rustad's curiosity had been aroused.

"Shouldn't we check that car?" he yelled to his companions.

Abraham Gehmer, at the wheel, accelerated, but not before Rustad had managed to note the license number---DB 15805. A white Peugeot, of course, is not a white Mazda, but Rustad knew that the Peugeot Model 504 and the Mazda Model 616 sedan were very similar in size and shape. Also, the Peugeot was filled with adults, just as the police expected the Mazda would be.

On the ride south that night, the atmosphere in the Peugeot was highly strained. Badly unnerved, Marianne was whimpering softly. Aerbel, trying to conceal his own nervousness, took her hand. Gehmer did not speak at all. Sylvia, who also kept silent, chain-smoked Gitanes and, before shoving the empty bottle under her seat, took nips from a flask of Chivas Regal.

Without further incident, however, they reached their destination, a flat in the Oslo suburb of Baerum, which Aerbel had rented a few days earlier.

About eight the next morning, the telephone rang. Sylvia answered.

"How is everyone?" Mike asked.

"Fine," she replied, sleepily.

"Zvi is on his way," Mike said. "He has a message for you." Then, promising to call again later, he rang off.

When Zvi Steinberg, the communications man, arrived a short time later, the message he carried was hardly momentous. "Mike wants you to turn in the green Volvo," he said. It was an odd (continued on page 178) Wrath of God (continued from page 174) order. Less than a dozen hours after the killing in Lillehammer, Mike seemed more interested in saving a day's auto-rental fee than in getting his agents out of Norway. After Zvi left, Aerbel said he would drive the Volvo to the Hertz office at Oslo's Fornebu airport; Marianne should follow in the Peugeot to bring him back. The arrangement pleased Sylvia, who wanted to take a long soaking bath. As soon as Gehmer finished washing his socks and underwear, Sylvia, exercising the prerogative of a beautiful woman, appropriated the bathroom and drew a hot bath.

All the while, Mike and the other Mossad agents acted as if they were oblivious to the fact that Norway had police forces that would inevitably search for the Lillehammer killers. By Sunday morning, the elite Norwegian federal investigative squad known as the I-Group had already been at work for several hours in Lillehammer. By interviewing local people and checking Oslo car-rental companies, the inspectors pieced together one significant clue. Two of the out-of-town cars observed in Lillehammer on the day of the killing had been rented by foreigners. The white Mazda, which was found abandoned near the scene of the killing, was an Avis car rented on July 16 by a Gustav Pistauer of Vienna. The white Peugeot, whose license plate had been noted by Sheriff Rustad, belonged to the Scandinavian Rent-A-Car, which had let it to a Canadian woman named Patricia Roxburgh.

The police station near Fornebu airport is called Sandvika, and the duty officer that Sunday morning was a bulky police sergeant, Bj?rn Tr?an. As he began his watch at eight A.M., he checked the telex transmissions that had come in overnight. He was surprised to see unusually long messages from the I-Group and he made certain that one copy was delivered to the police substation at Fornebu. When the copy arrived at the airport, Inspector Hans Lillejordet told the constables on duty in the passport booths to be on the lookout for suspicious departing foreigners. They should also pass the word to airport workers to be on the watch for a white Peugeot. At 9:15, Constable Sigmund Dyrdal repeated the message to the ticket clerks at the airline counters and gave them the Peugeot's license number.

About 45 minutes later, Asbj?rn St?rdahl, an SAS ticket officer, happened to glance toward the street outside. There, in the space reserved for unloading taxis on the departure ramp, stood a white Peugeot. St?rdahl looked at the license number---and looked again. "Things like this just don't happen," he said to himself. He walked briskly across the lobby to the booth where Dyrdal was examining passports.

"Tell me that number again, will you?" asked St?rdahl.

"DB 15805," replied the policeman.

"It's parked outside," declared St?rdahl.

Rushing to the ramp, Dyrdal found Marianne Gladnikoff sitting at the wheel.

"May I check your driver's license?" he asked.

Marianne complied---a bit too quickly. "Why are you stopping here?" the constable asked. "This is a no-parking zone."

"Oh, I didn't know," replied Marianne, feigning chagrin. "I am waiting for a Danish friend who has gone to turn in his car at a rental office."

"Would you please come along with me?" asked the constable.

Dyrdal escorted Marianne to the airport police office, where Inspector Lillejordet noticed that her hands were shaking uncontrollably. He telephoned the Hertz office and learned that a Dan Ert (the earlier version of Aerbel's family name) had just returned a car.

"Find him," the inspector told Dyrdal. The constable located Aerbel as he was walking toward the Peugeot. His arms loaded with two large bags full of food, Aerbel had just spent 100 crowns in the airport cafeteria buying a wide assortment of tea bags, cookies, sandwiches and the like.

"What do you have in those bags?" asked Dyrdal in a friendly manner.

"Groceries," replied Aerbel, smiling.

"You can't eat all that food alone," countered Dyrdal.

"Of course not," responded Aerbel. "I have friends who are waiting for me."

"Come on," said Dyrdal. "We'll drive you to them."

And that is precisely what happened. The police took Marianne and Aerbel in a car to their friends at the Baerum flat. There, Sylvia and Gehmer were requested to accompany the police, in order, they were told, "to clear up some questions about cars that were seen in the vicinity of a killing."

In two autos, the police drove the four agents to Lillehammer for questioning. At that stage of the investigation, the I-Group inspectors had no solid evidence linking the killing of Bouchiki to the presence of the cars rented by foreigners. Nor did the Norwegian authorities have even the faintest clue that they were dealing with agents of one of the world's toughest and most effective intelligence agencies.

On Sunday evening, as the four were interrogated separately in Lillehammer, Sylvia, Gehmer and Aerbel stuck pretty much to the same alibi, maintaining that they were only innocent tourists who had met by accident in Norway. But Marianne, her nerves shattered, broke down completely. For more than seven hours, she poured forth the whole story of the Israeli operation. Her account struck the Norwegian investigators as so fantastic that they tended not to believe her. The next day, when her interrogation was scheduled to resume, Marianne had recovered her composure and refused to submit to further questioning. "I am sorry I told you as much as I did," she said.

But if Marianne had regained her nerve overnight, Dan Aerbel had lost his. As a Jewish child in Denmark during World War Two, he had escaped the great Nazi roundup in 1942 by being hidden in a school basement, where he was literally walled into a small dark space. Aerbel spent two weeks in that confined area and, as a consequence, ever since, he had suffered from uncontrollable claustrophobia. One night in a locked cell in Lillehammer had been sufficient to undo him.

As the second day of interrogation began, a nervous and distraught Aerbel declared he was now prepared to tell more about his activities in Norway. In his own mind, he cherished the illusion that if the Norwegians only realized who he and his three companions really were, they would set them free. "I do have knowledge about the killing in Lillehammer," he conceded. "One of the reasons for my trip to Norway was to assist in that killing, carried out by the state of Israel against the Black September movement."

Aerbel urged his interrogators to check out his story with Israeli authorities if they did not believe him. "My contact in the Defense Ministry is a man called Mike," Aerbel declared. "Telephone him! He'll tell you the truth."

But the Norwegian police did not need to telephone Tel Aviv to establish the tie between the captured agents and the state of Israel. In Aerbel's passport they found a penciled telephone number, which they traced to an Israeli diplomat in Oslo whose apartment had served as the team's secret communications center. The next evening, a Norwegian raiding squad stormed into the apartment, capturing both Zvi Steinberg and Michael Dorf, the Mossad communications specialist who had been the relay man in the embassy.

Golda Meir's premonition had come true---something had gone wrong and there was nothing Israel could do about it. Despite Norway's deep affection for Israel, the captured members of the hit team were put on trial for criminal charges. In January 1974, Abraham Gehmer and Sylvia Rafael were sentenced to six and a half years in prison. Marianne Gladnikoff, Dan Aerbel and Zvi Steinberg were given lighter sentences. Michael Dorf was set free, reportedly because the Norwegian government did not wish to pursue the incident all the way to the Israeli embassy.

The other principals escaped. Kemal Benamane lives quietly today in a village in the Italo-Swiss district of Switzerland. Mike remains director of the Mossad's special branch; he even managed to get himself named to the board of inquiry on what had gone wrong at Lillehammer. Gustav Pistauer, who was fired from the Mossad for making the erroneous identification of Bouchiki as Salameh, now works as security supervisor in a large Israeli factory. Two months after her husband's assassination, Torill Bouchiki bore a child, a daughter. She named her Malika.

Ironically, the real Ali Hassan Salameh was in Scandinavia at the time of the Bouchiki killing. When he heard that an Arab had been shot in Norway, he decided his best course was to head for home. He made his way through Europe to Lebanon, where he lives today---in full realization that the Mossad is still dedicated to hunting him down.

The real consequences of the murder by mistake in Lillehammer were not felt in an Oslo courtroom, however, but in Israel, where they played a tragic role in that country's fate.

In the early evening of October 4, 1973, a secret agent of the Mossad arrived in Tel Aviv on an Air France flight. He was a quiet, scholarly man who operated in western Europe under the academic cover of distinguished philologist. He had just accomplished one of the great intelligence coups of all time: He had penetrated an Arab embassy in western Europe and succeeded in taking photos of the entire war plan for a joint Syrian-Egyptian attack on Israel, Operation Badr, to be launched in only two more days.

But as a result of the Lillehammer blunder, the Mossad no longer commanded the confidence it had once enjoyed in ruling circles. General Zamir requested a meeting with Israel's Premier Golda Meir the same evening. Meir, unconvinced that the information was genuine, sent Zamir and the agent to Moshe Dayan. Dayan, who was then in a strangely melancholic mood, suspected that the Arabs were feeding false information to gullible Mossad agents. Despite other signs of Arab mobilization, the Mossad's information was not acted upon and Israeli forces were not put on full alert.

On the dawn of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Hebrew calendar, the Arabs launched their surprise attack on the unprepared Israeli armies. It was not until two weeks later, when the army had finally fought the Arabs to a standoff, that the leaders of Israel belatedly realized they had been given the truth and had failed to accept it. Israeli soldiers' blood had been needlessly spilled. The Mossad agent who had delivered the war plan was inconsolable. Over and over, he repeated to himself the words of the handwriting on the wall in the book of Daniel: "Thou art weighed in the balance, and art found wanting."

In the summer of 1973, David B. Tinnin, then European correspondent for Time, was asked for his opinion of a story from the magazine's Norwegian stringer, Dag Christensen, a reporter for the Oslo newspaper Aftenposten. Christensen was speculating that the murder of an Arab waiter in the remote Norwegian town of Lillehammer had been the work of an Israeli intelligence team. Tinnin's reaction: Nonsense. Then, in February 1974, while following expelled Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn on his house-hunting odyssey northward into Norway, Tinnin met Christensen and heard more details of the story. Convincing details. Tinnin had already been intrigued by fragmentary reports in the European press about the mysterious deaths of an Israeli here and an Arab there and about the possibility that the killings were part of an unseen war of the spooks. The Norwegian incident provided the clincher. During the following 18 months, Tinnin spent his vacations, long weekends and two substantial leaves of absence shuttling between Washington, Europe and the Near East, checking, tracking down and triangulating against different sources the material on which his forthcoming book, Hit Team (written with Christensen, and to be published this fall by Little, Brown in the U.S. and by other firms in nine countries abroad), is based. Some of the material came from public records: some from witnesses to the various killings, from relatives of victims, even from Arab diplomats; some from off-the-record interviews; some from classified documents to which Tinnin gained access. It is a starting story, specially adapted for Playboy by the author.