The BKA believed the passports found in the Frankfurt telephone kiosk were the precursor of more slaughter. The agency called in the BundesNachrichten Dienst (BND), the republic’s equivalent of the CIA, who informed the MI6 liaison officer attached to BND headquarters in Pullach, in southern Germany. In London, MI6 established that the passports were expert forgeries. That ruled out the IRA and most other terrorist groups. They did not have the capability to produce such high-quality documents. Suspicion switched to the KGB; their forgers were among the best in the business. But the Russians were known to have a stockpile of passports and certainly it was not their style to use a phone booth as a pickup point. The South African security service, BOSS, was also ruled out. It had virtually stopped operating in Europe, and false British passports were hardly needed in the unsophisticated African countries where BOSS now concentrated its activities. MI6 turned to the only other intelligence service who could make good use of the passports—Mossad.
Arie Regev, an attaché at the Israeli embassy in London who was also the resident katsa, was invited to meet a senior MI6 officer to discuss the matter. Regev said he knew nothing about the passports but agreed to raise the matter with Tel Aviv. Back came the swift response from Nahum Admoni: the passports had nothing to do with Mossad. He suggested that they could be the work of the East Germans; Mossad had recently discovered that the Stasi, the East German security service, was not above selling fake passports to Jews desperate to travel to Israel, in return for hard currency. Admoni knew the passports had been created by Mossad forgers—and were intended to be used by katsas working under cover in Europe and to enable them to more easily enter and leave Britain.
Despite an “understanding” with MI5 that Rafi Eitan had originally helped hammer out, in which Mossad agreed it would keep MI5 informed of all operations inside Britain, the agency was secretly running an agent in England in the hope it would lead to a double triumph for Mossad: killing the commander of the PLO’s elite Special Forces unit—Force 17—and ending Yasser Arafat’s increasing success in establishing a relationship with the Thatcher government.
In London, no longer was Arafat’s name synonymous with terrorism. Mrs. Thatcher had slowly become convinced that he could bring about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East that would both recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people and assure the security of Israel. Jewish leaders were more skeptical. They argued it was only terrorism that had brought the PLO to the stage at which it was now, and that the organization would continue to use the threat of more terrorist actions unless all its demands were met. Not for the first time, London was unmoved by Tel Aviv’s protestations. Mossad continued to regard Britain as a country which, despite the outcome of the Iranian embassy siege, was becoming too ready to support the Palestinian cause. There was already concern within Mossad over the way the PLO had managed to cozy up to the CIA.
Contacts between the United States and the PLO would later be precisely dated by former secretary of state Henry Kissinger. He would reveal in his memoirs,
When he learned of the pact, Yitzhak Hofi fumed that in the long history of expediency, there had never been a worse example. Using his back channel to the CIA, Hofi tried to have Walters cancel the agreement. The CIA deputy director said that was not possible and warned Hofi that Washington would regard it as an “unfriendly act” if news of the pact became public. It was a shot across the bow not to let loose Mossad’s Department of Psychological Warfare on friendly journalists.
Hofi’s anger became apocalyptic when he discovered whom Arafat had put in charge of administering the PLO end of the pact: Ali Hassan Salameh, the Red Prince, the Black September group leader who had planned the Munich massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Khartoum; Salameh, the man whose life would finally end the way it had been lived, in a powerful explosion arranged by Rafi Eitan. But that was still some years away. In 1973, Salameh was a revered figure within the PLO and Arafat had no hesitation about appointing him to liaise with the CIA. What genuinely shocked Mossad was that the CIA had accepted the Red Prince barely a year after the Munich killings and the murder of the U.S. envoy in Khartoum.
