Barak received a fourteen-year sentence, Dr. Shapiro and Abithol ten years apiece. Yusufu was given twelve years’ imprisonment. All were subsequently released after remission for good conduct and quietly deported to Israel. As it had for others before them who had served Mossad well, the service made sure they would remain out of the limelight and not have to answer such troubling questions as to whether Dr. Shapiro, who had so flagrantly broken his Hippocratic oath, still practiced medicine—and for whom.
Nahum Admoni was told by MI5 that if there was a further lapse, Mossad would be treated as an unfriendly service. By then the Mossad chief was planning yet another operation designed to remind Britain of who the real enemies were—and at the same time gain sympathy for Israel.
On a cloudless morning in February 1986, two Israeli air force fighter aircraft swooped down on a Libyan-registered Learjet flying from Tripoli to Damascus. The civilian plane was in international airspace, thirty thousand feet over the Mediterranean and about to begin its descent into Syrian airspace. On board were delegates returning from a conference of Palestinian and other radical groups that Mu’ammar Gadhafi had convened to discuss new steps to achieve the Libyan leader’s burning obsession to see Israel driven from the face of the earth.
The sight of the fighters taking up stations on either side of the Learjet created near panic among its fourteen passengers, and for good reason. Four months before, on Tuesday, October 1, 1985, Israeli F-15 fighter-bombers had destroyed the headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organization southeast of Tunis, flying a round-trip of almost three thousand miles, which had involved air-to-air refueling and the kind of precise intelligence that always sent a collective shiver throughout the Arab world.
That raid was a direct response to the murder by PLO gunmen of three middle-aged Israeli tourists as they sat aboard their yacht in the Cypriot port of Larnaca only days before, basking in the sunshine of late summer. The killings had occurred on Yom Kippur and, for many Israelis, the slaughter rekindled memories of the onset of the war on the Day of Atonement when the nation itself had been caught as unaware as the tourists.
Despite having endured almost four decades of terrorism, the murders caused widespread horror and fear among Israelis: the tourists had been held for some time on board their boat and allowed to write down their final thoughts before they were killed: first to die was the woman, fatally shot in the stomach. Her two male companions were made to throw her overboard. Then one after another, they were shot at point-blank range in the back of the head.
In the black propaganda war that had long been a feature of the intelligence war between the PLO and Israel, the former claimed that the three victims were Mossad agents on a mission. So well did the PLO plant the story that several European newspapers identified the woman as one of the agents caught in the Lillehammer affair in 1973. That woman was still alive and had long given up her Mossad activities.
Since then the Arab press had been full of dire warnings that Israel would retaliate. Many of the stories had been planted by Mossad’s psychological warfare department to fray still further the nerves of millions of Arabs.
The passengers in the Learjet, who only a few hours before had chanted for the destruction of Israel at the Libyan conference, saw the grim faces of their enemy peering at them. One of the fighters waggled its wings, the follow-me signal recognized the world over by pilots. To reinforce the message, an Israeli pointed a gloved hand straight ahead and then downward toward Galilee. The women on board the jet began to wail; some of the men started to pray. Others stared ahead fatalistically. They all knew this had always been a possibility; the accursed infidels had the capability to reach out and snatch them from the sky.
One of the Israeli aircraft fired a short warning burst from its cannon, warning the Learjet’s captain not to contemplate radioing for help from the Syrian air force—only minutes’ flying time away. The passengers’ fear increased. Were they, too, about to suffer the same fate that had befallen one of the authentic heroes of the Arab world?
Just a month before the Tunis air raid, an Israeli naval patrol boat with Mossad agents on board had stopped a small ship called
