The resulting diplomatic furor nearly ruined Chirac’s career. He found himself being attacked on one side by his own president, François Mitterand, and on the other fending off furious telephone calls from Helmut Kohl demanding he must retract. Chirac did what politicians often do. He said he had been misquoted. In London, Scotland Yard said the matter had been fully dealt with by the courts and there was no need for further comment. In Paris, the office of Jacques Chirac—in 1997 president of France—said he had no recall of the interview with the
Soon another sting would leave Mossad with a further stain on its reputation.
Nahum Admoni’s demise as director general of Mossad began on a July afternoon in 1986, the result of an incident on one of those Bonn streets built in the post–World War II building boom in Germany. Forty years later the street had become a mature avenue with small but well-kept front gardens and maids’ quarters in the rear. Security systems were discreetly hidden behind wrought-iron gates and the lower windows were mullioned, the result of using bottle glass.
No one saw the person who left a plastic carrier bag in the telephone booth at the end of the street. A police patrol car spotted it and stopped to investigate. The bag contained eight freshly minted blank British passports. The immediate reaction of the local office of the Bundeskriminal Amt (BKA), the equivalent of the FBI, was that the passports were for one of the terrorist groups who had brought terrorism to the streets of Europe with a series of violent and brutal bombings and kidnappings.
Representing causes and minorities from all corners of the world, they were determined to force their way to a role in setting the agenda for international policy. They had found ready support from the radical student politics that had swept Britain and the Continent. Since 1968, when Leila Khaled, a young Palestinian woman revolutionary, hijacked a jet plane to London and was promptly released because the British government feared further attacks, naive students had chanted the agitprop slogans of the PLO. Those middle-class young radicals had a romanticized view of the PLO as “freedom fighters” who, instead of taking drugs, took the lives of the bourgeoisie, and instead of holding sit-ins, held hostages.
The BKA assumed that the passports had been left by a student acting as a courier for a terrorist group. The list of groups was dauntingly long, ranging from the IRA or Germany’s own Red Army Faction to foreign groups like the INFS, Islamic National Front of Sudan; the ELN, the National Liberation Army of Colombia; the MDRA, the Angola Liberation Movement; or the LTTE, the Tamil Tigers. These and many more had cells or cadres through the Federal Republic. Any one of them could be planning to use the passports to attack one of the British military bases in Germany or travel to Britain and stage an outrage there.
Despite being Western Europe’s leading former imperial power, initially Britain had only encountered continued terrorism at the hands of the IRA. But its intelligence services had warned it was only a matter of time before other foreign groups, allowed to operate against their own countries from London, would drag Britain into their machinations. A foretaste of what could happen came when a group opposed to the Tehran regime took over the Iranian embassy in 1980. When negotiations failed, the Thatcher government sent in the SAS, who killed the terrorists. That well-publicized action had led to a sudden decline in Middle Eastern plots hatched in London. Instead, Paris had become the battleground for bloody internal conflicts between various foreign organizations, most notably Yasser Arafat’s PLO and Abu Nidal and his gunmen. Mossad had also done its share of killing Arab enemies on the streets of the French capital.
