One evening, in the autumn of 1972, a young Palestinian man took a last sip of his drink, left the neighbourhood bar, and walked towards his apartment. His name was Wael Zwaiter and he freelanced as a translator at the Libyan embassy in Rome. He also translated classics and had just finished the Italian translation of One Thousand and One Nights.1 That October night, Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, decided it would be Zwaiter’s last: as he entered the stairway that led up to his apartment, two men with handguns appeared and shot eleven bullets into his body – eleven bullets for the eleven Israeli athletes killed in the Munich Olympics massacre, which had happened just a month earlier.2
According to Mossad, Wael Zwaiter not only was a poet and translator, but also actively supported Palestinian terrorism in Europe, including the Munich attack. How did Mossad select Zwaiter as a target, how did they know about his alleged terrorism involvement, and what help did they receive to organise this killing operation? As this book reveals for the first time, it was with the help of European intelligence agencies.
The murder of Wael Zwaiter was the first of ten assassination missions in Europe and the Middle East undertaken by Mossad after the 1972 Munich Olympics attack. This assassination campaign is known today as Operation Wrath of God (Hebrew: מבצע זעם האל Mivtza Za’am Ha’el ) and is one of Mossad’s most spectacular targeted killing operations.3 The operation consisted of ten missions to kill Palestinians who were directly or loosely associated with Palestinian terrorism. The purpose of this covert action was to avenge past terrorist victims, to disrupt current terrorist plans, and to deter anyone from perpetrating future terrorist actions.
This volume examines the role of European intelligence agencies in Operation Wrath of God and in countering Palestinian terrorist attacks. Its central argument is that European intelligence played a vital role in the organisation and execution of Operation Wrath of God. The book demonstrates this by analysing the intelligence that was shared within a multilateral intelligence liaison.4 It is shown that intelligence agencies kept each other updated about Palestinian terrorism and thus maintained direct links with one other. This led to a shared mindset among intelligence officers across national boundaries. Officers generally assumed that Palestinians were potential terrorist suspects who needed to be stopped. In doing so, European intelligence agencies helped to prevent Palestinian terrorists from organising attacks, but they also helped Mossad in assassinating terrorist suspects. Altogether, the book thus reveals a covert European struggle against the Palestinians. This active role of European intelligence agencies has until today not been known and will be revealed here for the first time.
This research is innovative because of its perspective of linking a country that carries out a covert action and the one that hosts it. The volume reveals European complicity in a controversial Israeli covert action, explains the methods that Mossad used to organise the operation, and recounts the story as a back-and-forth between Palestinian terrorist actions and intelligence agencies’ reactions. It is unique because an intelligence service’s sources, methods, and foreign connections are among the most carefully guarded secrets in the world. This book analyses all three based on large-scale documentary evidence.
Israel was able to (ab)use European intelligence through a secret liaison called the Club de Berne. This multilateral liaison was founded in 1969 by eight intelligence agencies from Western European countries and was linked to ten additional European and extra-European partners (including Mossad, Shin Bet, and the FBI).5 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, weapon 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.6 Cooperation continued over decades and has developed into a cross-country near-institutionalised intelligence apparatus.7 Today, the Club de Berne is the most important informal counterterrorism intelligence channel in Europe and among its partners.8
By the time the Israeli government decided to approve Operation Wrath of God, the Club de Berne exchanges had already developed into a widely used counterterrorism intelligence-sharing tool. With the existence of such a mechanism, it was logical for Israel to use it to operationalise Operation Wrath of God. Thus, without prior knowledge or approval, European intelligence agencies had become a central component of the operation. Their intelligence was useful in three main ways.
First, through the Club de Berne, Israel received help from European agencies in identifying the Palestinians responsible for or involved in the planning or execution of the Munich massacre. This was important for Mossad because every killing operation had to be justified to Prime Minister Golda Meir and a Palestinian’s involvement in Munich was a clear reason to put someone on the kill list.
Second, Mossad received valuable intelligence on the whereabouts and movement of Palestinian suspects, some of whom had been on Mossad’s kill list. European partners helped Mossad locate terrorist suspects, initially without knowing that they were going to be killed. Israel thus received help in the planning and organisation of their killing operations. In other words, the European intelligence agencies helped with the groundwork to trace the alleged terrorists on Israel’s death list. The Israelis only enquired about some of the targets, as it would have raised suspicions if Palestinians were killed shortly after Israel informally asked about them.
Third, and most importantly, after every assassination in Europe, the respective intelligence agencies would report to the Club de Berne about the case, share detailed police reports, and regularly provide updates about the ongoing criminal investigations. This provided Mossad with very clear indications as to whether the European authorities had any suspicions that Israel might have been behind the murder.
Two examples are worth mentioning in this respect, which illustrate how this type of intelligence was useful for Israel. First, after the above-mentioned assassination of Wael Zwaiter in Rome on 16 October 1972, the Italian intelligence agency SISDE sent – in good faith – every detail about the killers that they could find. For instance, a witness at the murder scene had been able to write down the licence plate of the car that the killers had used to escape. Italy investigated this car further, found out that it was a rental car, and shared with its Club de Berne partners the alleged name of the driver. This was, of course, the cover name of the Mossad officer who had rented the car for this operation. Mossad thus knew that it needed to be more careful next time when organising the escape of its hit men.
Similarly, as a second example, after the assassination of Mohamed Boudia on 28 June 1973 in Paris, the French intelligence agency, DST, shared the results of its investigation. It informed its partners that the French police believed that the car explosion was an accident during the transport of weapons. In reality it was, of course, Mossad who had placed the explosives in Boudia’s car and detonated them remotely.
This kind of intelligence was very helpful for Mossad because they could gauge whether their cover had been blown or where they might have to be more careful with the next killing. The European agencies thus sent very useful information on how to continuously improve Mossad’s killing operations in Europe. In short, the murderers were kept updated about the investigations of their own murders.
A central question related to the European role is: how much did European intelligence know about Operation Wrath of God? If they did, at what point did they understand that they were being used for this operation? According to secondary literature and contemporary newspaper articles, some suspicions circulated that Mossad might have been behind the frequent murders of Palestinians. Arab circles already pointed to Mossad as early as the second kill (Mahmoud al-Hamshari), in early December 1972. After the fourth assassination (Basil al-Kubaisi) in April 1973, mainstream newspapers like Le Monde strongly suggested that Israeli intelligence was behind it. Nevertheless, Italy and France continued to share intelligence with the Kilowatt group, which included Mossad. These intelligence reports were about Palestinian terrorist activities more generally but also specifically about investigations concerning these murder cases. This means that countries on whose soil the assassinations happened shared intelligence with Mossad despite the rising suspicions that Mossad was the killer.
In July 1973 there was the so-called Lillehammer affair. In Lillehammer, a small Norwegian town, Mossad organised the execution of someone who it thought was a top terrorist. However, the Israeli intelligence agency in fact murdered a completely innocent man, a Moroccan waiter and father-to-be. In an amateurishly executed escape and cover-up attempt, some Mossad officers were caught by the Norwegian police. The subsequent trial exposed Operation Wrath of God and clearly linked Mossad to the assassination operations in France, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus that had occurred over the previous months.
This was the point when France and Italy officially realised the extent of Mossad’s killing operation and that the lion’s share happened on their territory. This infringed European countries’ sovereignty and brought the Middle East conflict right to their doorsteps. It was also a form of intelligence abuse because Club de Berne intelligence exchanges were meant to collectively enhance knowledge about Palestinian terrorists in Europe, not to help kill them. European governments heavily criticised Israel for this covert action, which led to a Euro-Israeli diplomatic crisis.
However, amidst official condemnations and crises, the strong counterterrorism ties between the countries’ intelligence communities remained entirely intact. Club de Berne and its counterterrorism intelligence channels continued uninterrupted on a daily basis. In essence, nothing changed in any way on the operational level, neither when rumours about Mossad involvement first appeared nor when European intelligence agencies unmistakably understood that their intelligence had supported Israel’s killing operation.
One can thus describe the practice in the Club de Berne as a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Even at the height of the Lillehammer scandal, it was ‘business as usual’ in the intelligence world. Agencies continued to share warnings about Middle Eastern terrorists, reports based on past terrorist attacks, alerts about suspects, and explanations of terrorist groups’ operational methods.
The preservation of close Euro-Israeli intelligence ties can be explained through the important benefits that Club de Berne cooperation yielded for all parties involved. European agencies entered this liaison in 1971 with a genuine concern about terrorism. Israeli intelligence also needed European help to counter the threat. The Club de Berne and Kilowatt pre-dated the Munich Olympics attack and the Israeli decision to avenge its victims.
In Israel’s view, killing terrorists before they were able to perpetrate an attack was one of many ways to counter the threat. It is thus logical or understandable that Mossad used the already existing framework to obtain information for its operations. From an Israeli perspective, Club de Berne cooperation served as a force multiplier and was essential to successfully combat the terrorist threat. From the European perspective, similarly, cooperation with Israel was essential to thwart terrorist plots in Europe.
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 counterterrorism intelligence liaison between Europe and its partners; only the cooperation code word changed from ‘Kilowatt’ to ‘Phoenix’ in the 1990s.
Mossad’s Covert Accomplices
When Operation Wrath of God was launched, Mossad was directly connected to seventeen European intelligence agencies through the Club de Berne, a secret coalition of intelligence agencies. They shared information about Palestinians on a colossal scale. Because intelligence cooperation was so beneficial for all the parties, the Europeans let Mossad operate and tolerated the use of its shared intelligence to kill Palestinians. Hence, this volume’s overall argument is that the extensive advantages European agencies gained through Club de Berne intelligence-sharing led them to turn a blind eye towards, or tacitly support, Israeli covert actions on their respective territories. In other words, European agencies, and, indirectly, the governments they served, implicitly condoned Israel’s covert actions on their territories.
One can push this argument further and speculate that some European agencies even benefited from or agreed with Israel’s practice of killing Palestinian terrorist suspects. Or, more provocatively, one can ask whether the Israelis did the ‘dirty work’ for the Europeans. This remains an open question, but it is clear that Euro-Israeli liaison in the Club de Berne was such an asset for European intelligence that they were willing to ignore any risks, possible downsides, or repercussions of this cooperation. European intelligence that was used for Operation Wrath of God thus highlights an extreme case of intelligence-sharing and shows how far counterterrorism intelligence cooperation could go.
This book consistently shows how Club de Berne intelligence was used for two purposes. First, it helped Mossad organise its killing mission. Second, it collectively enhanced European capacities to counter Palestinian terrorism. The book thus employs a dual focus. First, each chapter analyses a Mossad assassination and the role of European intelligence in conducting it. Second, each chapter recounts Black September attacks and explains how the Club de Berne tried to counter them. Some of the terrorist plots are revealed for the first time. Particularly interesting are the cases where agencies thwarted attacks through cooperation, uncovered new terrorist methods, and collectively increased their knowledge about Palestinian groups.
This demonstrates the centrality of intelligence-sharing to European security. The book highlights the hands-on experiences of intelligence practitioners in the 1970s and shows how intelligence officers managed to establish successful and effective counterterrorism cooperation early in the decade. By the same token, through the intelligence reports the book presents new insights into terrorist practices at the time and terrorism innovation. These include terrorist methods, how Black September and other Palestinian groups were working, and the role of women in terrorist plots.
The book further illustrates the international relations of the secret state – a secret security order that was enabled because intelligence agencies were able to have direct connections with one another. Since intelligence agencies could keep their actions secret, their policies did not have to be justified publicly. This meant that intelligence services did not need to respect the same normative considerations as official foreign policy lines. In this way, Club de Berne cooperation created a covert space where Europeans (even neutral states) could facilitate an Israeli assassination operation. It also created space for state relations to be pursued independently of official foreign policy constraints. This was the case, for instance, between the UK’s MI5 and Mossad, both Club de Berne members. These agencies cooperated closely in security matters, even though in the early 1970s the UK had a very critical foreign policy towards Israel. Relatedly, direct communication channels among intelligence officials enabled an additional layer of state diplomacy, one that could follow different rules to official state relations. Through the analysis of intelligence-sharing about Black September terrorism, new aspects of this secret security order become apparent.
The story of Europe’s covert struggle against Palestinian terrorism is recounted chronologically ‘kill by kill’ and ‘attack by attack’ in three main parts. Part I focuses on the preparation of Operation Wrath of God and how the Europeans were instrumental to it. Part II analyses how Operation Wrath of God was carried out, details how European intelligence contributed to it, and examines how agencies tried to prevent Black September attacks via intelligence cooperation. Part III analyses the continuation of cooperation after Operation Wrath of God was exposed by the Lillehammer affair.
The above-mentioned dual-focus structure allows the story of Operation Wrath of God to be told as back-and-forth actions and reactions between Mossad assassinations, Black September attacks, and the role of European intelligence agencies in relation to both.
Some themes run across the volume, including questions relating to the effectiveness of covert actions, Mossad’s logic and rationale for selecting the Palestinians who were killed, terrorism innovation techniques, European leniency towards terrorist offenders, and the day-to-day workings of intelligence practitioners and how they moulded a parallel secret security order.
Secret Records
This volume uses archival records from the above-mentioned secret intelligence-sharing group called the Club de Berne. The goal of the Club de Berne was to ensure an effective exchange of information and knowledge about terrorism and espionage. When the above-mentioned Kilowatt alerting system was introduced, the intelligence agencies had a direct link to one another and could send information straight from one operative to another. All eight Western European Club de Berne founding members and ten partner agencies participated in the Kilowatt encrypted telex system. In alphabetical order, the countries that were part of the Kilowatt system were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Luxemburg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The agencies shared warnings, threat assessments, updates about ongoing police investigations, intelligence about suspects, and detailed insights into the inner workings of terrorist groups. In short, Kilowatt members and their partners shared intelligence if it was deemed timely, relevant, and helpful for another agency to counter the common terrorist threat.9
The author was the first historian to obtain completely unredacted access to all cables that were sent under the Club de Berne alerting system from October 1971 onwards.10 This amounts to more than forty thousand cables that were sent from eighteen different intelligence agencies.11 The source material for this volume includes the daily correspondence among Kilowatt members before, during, and after Operation Wrath of God (1972–1979).12 The core of the operation lasted from September 1972 until July 1973 and these dates form the main timeframe of the book.
The policy in this book is to identify a person’s name only if they were mentioned in the press, were convicted, have since passed away, were well-known at the time, or are mentioned in publicly available records. Otherwise, their names have been changed or only anonymised initials are given. All intelligence reports, warnings, and assessments are compared with what we currently know about the Operation Wrath of God assassinations and Palestinian terrorism through journalistic accounts and secondary literature. This provides important context to the book’s storyline. Furthermore, use of the term ‘terrorism’ or ‘terrorist’ is not a moral or political judgement but refers to the strategy employed by the Palestinian armed groups at this time.
Despite its importance, or precisely because of it, to this day the Club de Berne remains an extremely secretive liaison and very little is known about its operations. It is very rare for researchers to obtain access to the documentary evidence of a multilateral intelligence liaison, especially where one can see exactly what was shared by which agency.
Through the uniqueness of the source base, the rare insights into the operational work of intelligence agencies, and the novel questions that it raises about the international relations of the secret state, this volume makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship.
New Revelations
This book embarks on entirely new research territory as it is the first study of a Mossad covert operation based on documentary evidence. Furthermore, there are at present very few publications that look at covert action and intelligence cooperation.13 The source body for this book is exceptional as it reveals intelligence agencies’ methods and interactions among a secret group of partner services. By using currently available publications about every aspect of Operation Wrath of God in conjunction with more than forty thousand intelligence records from eighteen agencies, this book offers the most authoritative account of this covert action to date.
The first accounts of the operation, published in 1976 and 1984, focused on its spectacular nature and included the stories of how the individuals were killed by Mossad’s assassination teams.14 In 1993, Operation Wrath of God was acknowledged for the first time by a former Israeli intelligence official. In a BBC interview on 23 November 1993, General Aharon Yariv confirmed that a covert operation to kill Palestinian terrorists in Europe did indeed happen.15 In 1972, Yariv was the core counterterrorism adviser to Prime Minister Golda Meir and part of the decision-making team that authorised the operation. More recent studies have analysed the operation through the lens of Israeli intelligence, based on interviews with Mossad officials.16 Other studies covered Operation Wrath of God as part of a broader history of Israeli intelligence.17
This volume builds on these works and adds two crucial elements. First, it demonstrates that European intelligence cooperation was a key element for Mossad to plan, organise, and carry out Operation Wrath of God. European involvement in Operation Wrath of God has until now been unknown, and it has not been addressed in either academic writing or journalistic accounts.18 Second, this book explains how Mossad selected the Palestinian targets who were to be killed. It is currently not well understood why certain Palestinians were on Mossad’s kill list. Mossad is often accused of having arbitrarily selected its victims because some of them were believed to have no relation to terrorist activities.19 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. This explains the logic behind this covert operation. Altogether, this book tells the story of a major Mossad covert operation and the role of European intelligence in its execution. It is the first study to discuss in such detail an agency’s methods when organising a covert action and its reliance on foreign intelligence.
Given that we currently know very little about the international relations of the secret state, this volume has the potential to revise the way we see these relations. It opens up new ways of thinking of these secret relations as parallel ties to official diplomatic relations that can at times both reflect and also defy official state policies. In the case of the intelligence exchanges surrounding Operation Wrath of God, we see official condemnation but secret collaboration. We see European complicity with Israel’s ruthless killing measures, which brings to light a rather dark aspect of the history of European counterterrorism policy. Altogether, this story reveals entirely new facets of European and Middle Eastern history. It is a history that stakeholders perhaps would have preferred to keep secret forever. However, the story is important in understanding past and future international relations of intelligence agencies and their wider political cross-regional implications.
This book makes a significant contribution to existing scholarship in various fields. Its contribution is strongest in four major debates in international and intelligence history. First, the book contributes to the field of international history by recounting hitherto entirely unknown aspects of the history of Euro-Middle Eastern relations, the Arab–Israeli conflict, and the global Cold War. During that time an international secret struggle raged, in which Soviet intelligence supported liberation movements in Africa and the Middle East, including Palestinian movements. Recent historiography has provided a more nuanced picture of the logistical support and the level of influence that Eastern bloc countries were able to exert over resistance movements.20 By researching the support of European intelligence for Israel in its fight against Palestinians, this book reveals that European countries were secretly supporting the other side, Israel, while upholding very critical foreign political stances towards Israel. It thus reveals an important component of the secret global Cold War.
Second, this volume contributes to intelligence studies by revealing for the first time the sources and methods of Mossad’s covert action and by exposing the extent to which it relied on foreign intelligence. This debunks a common myth about Mossad, as it shows that the Israeli agency was not as omnipotent or omniscient as often portrayed in secondary literature. The book further addresses the dilemmas of countries on the receiving end of covert operations, a perspective rarely considered. With its focus on Mossad’s covert actions in Europe, it also contributes to scholarship that moves away from the dominant analysis of US or UK covert actions.21
Third, this book makes an important contribution to international relations (IR), as it shows how nations secretly worked together to counter a common threat. The chapters about intelligence cooperation especially reveal new insights into the politics and mechanisms of intelligence-sharing. Research on intelligence cooperation is growing, albeit slowly, and it is still a research area with very few works that use primary sources or archival data.22
There is a dominant view among IR scholars that there is no or only minimal intelligence cooperation between states. These works argue that intelligence touches on the very core of national security and sovereignty and assume therefore that there are no or only very limited intelligence exchanges and only in selected cases where there is a specific shared interest.23
Using the Club de Berne’s decade-long exchanges of intelligence reports that were based on extremely vulnerable sources and sensitive national security information, this volume contributes to the growing understanding that, on the contrary, intelligence agencies do work together intensely on numerous aspects. In doing so, they create their own dynamic and foster strategic links between themselves, independent of official foreign political interests.24
The third part of this book in particular shows 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.25
Fourth, another core focus of this volume is Palestinian terrorist activities and how intelligence agencies attempted to counter these terrorist plans through cooperation. Several terrorist plots as described in this book have until today remained entirely unknown. The book recounts new aspects of the Palestinian armed struggle. Some terrorist events have only been mentioned by contemporary journalistic accounts and this book substantiates some of these claims with documentary evidence from the intelligence agencies and contextualises them in the wider Arab–Israeli conflict.26 The analysis of these terrorist events and the intelligence agencies’ reactions offers important insights into and contributes to the study of terrorism and international security.27 Through the eyes of intelligence reports, the volume advances knowledge about terrorist practices at the time and terrorism innovation.28
Altogether, this book is of interest to people in various fields, including international relations scholars, intelligence scholars, historians, and students of war and conflict studies. Given its proximity and relevance to current events, it will also be of great interest to a non-academic audience.
Reflections on Current Events
The massacre that happened in Israel on 7 October 2023 is sometimes referred to as ‘Israel’s 9/11’. But, arguably, Israel already had a watershed terrorist moment deeply ingrained in its national consciousness: the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972. Both terrorist attacks, 7 October and 5 September, have indelibly changed Israel. Neither event was foreseen by its security and intelligence forces. Both events were broadcast globally, the Olympics via television and the 7 October attack via social media. Both terrorist groups took hostages and demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange. Lastly, albeit the scale of events was different, both attacks triggered strong Israeli demands for revenge: the perpetrators needed to be punished and wiped out.
Echoing Operation Wrath of God, Israeli intelligence formed a special unit as a reaction to the 7 October massacre. This unit, called ‘Nili’ (an acronym in Hebrew which translates to ‘the Eternal One of Israel will not Lie’), is tasked with hunting down and eliminating any person involved in the attacks. Israeli intelligence thus not only launched military operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, but also sought to assassinate its leadership abroad.
As this book demonstrates, the success of Operation Wrath of God depended heavily on intelligence cooperation with Europe. The Nili unit, with targets spread around mainly Muslim countries, is confronted with a rather more hostile environment. This makes Nili’s operations a lot riskier than those of its precursor in Europe. This raises the question of whether European or Middle Eastern powers will again support Israel’s extrajudicial killings. If they do, they may face serious political risks if it ever becomes known that they provided intelligence for Mossad’s assassinations. Informal intelligence-sharing arrangements with regional powers, which are kept entirely secret, plausibly denied, and minimally documented, might again prove useful for Israel’s operation. Perhaps in fifty years’ time we will see another book that reveals how Nili operated and whether Israeli intelligence received help from the ‘hosts’ of the covert action. Altogether, recent events have shown that assassinating Palestinian terrorist leaders abroad has remained a core element in Israel’s counterterrorism policy.
