In London, the Foreign Office called in the Israeli ambassador and delivered a strong protest accompanied by a demand that such behavior would not happen again. The only small comfort for Admoni was that no one had mentioned Ismail Sowan.
In the early evening of July 22, 1987, Ismail Sowan turned on the BBC early-evening television news in his Hull apartment. He had not heard from Mossad since April, when Bashar Samara had traveled to Hull for a meeting at the city’s railway station and told Sowan to keep a low profile until further notice—unless Mustapha made contact.
Now, the face of the man Mustapha had said deserved to die filled the screen; Naji Al-Ali, the cartoonist, had been shot as he left the offices of
Sowan remembered a previous conversation with Mustapha. He became increasingly certain Yasser Arafat had ordered the shooting. He suddenly wondered if he was the only person Mustapha had confided in about the need for the cartoonist to die. Sowan decided it would be best for him and his wife to fly to Tel Aviv. But even as they packed, there was a knock on the front door. Sowan would recall:
“The man had two suitcases. He said Mustapha needed to hide them urgently. When I said I wanted to know what was inside, he just smiled and told me not to worry. ‘He who asks no questions is told no lies,’ was all he would say. When he was gone, I looked inside the cases. They were full of arms and explosives: enough Semtex to blow up the Tower of London; AK-47s, pistols, detonators, the works.”
Ismail called the special Mossad contact number in London. It had been disconnected. He telephoned the Israeli embassy. He was told that Arie Regev and Jacob Barad were not available. He asked to speak to Bashar Samara. The voice at the other end of the phone asked him to wait. A new voice came on the line. When Ismail gave his name, the voice said, “This is a good time for a holiday in the sun.” The words were a signal for Sowan to travel to Tel Aviv.
There, in the Sheraton Hotel, he met Jacob Barad and Bashar Samara. He explained what he had done after discovering the contents of the suitcase. They told him to wait while they reported to their superiors. Later that night, Samara returned and told Sowan to fly to London on the next plane. When he arrived he would find everything had been taken care of.
Not suspecting what lay ahead, Sowan flew to London on August 4, 1987. He was arrested by armed Special Branch officers at Heathrow and charged with the murder of Naji Al-Ali. When he protested he was a Mossad agent, the officers laughed at him. Sowan had become as expendable as the cartoonist who had died after two weeks clinging to life in hospital. Sowan would be sacrificed in an attempt to regain favor with the Thatcher government. The presence of the arms cache in Sowan’s apartment would destroy any effort he made to claim he was employed by Mossad. The arms had been brought there by a Mossad sayan.
In London, Arie Regev had turned over to MI5—who passed it on to Scotland Yard—all the “evidence” Mossad had “accumulated” of Sowan’s “involvement” with terrorism. The file detailed how Mossad had tailed Sowan through the Middle East, Europe, and Britain, never able to obtain enough proof until now. The moment the arms cache had been discovered, Mossad decided, “in the name of common security,” to turn in Sowan.
The decision to do so was a grim reminder of Mossad’s unwritten law of expediency. A great deal of time and money had been invested by the service in training and supporting Sowan in the field. But when the time came, all that counted for nothing when weighed against the greater need for Mossad to cover its own tracks in Britain. Sowan would be the sacrificial victim, served up to the British as an example of the kind of terrorist Mossad was always warning about. There would be a loss, of course: Sowan had done a good enough job—even if he had failed to deliver all that was asked of him. But the arms cache had been too good an opportunity to miss. It would wreck the PLO’s relationship with the Thatcher government and allow Israel to present Yasser Arafat as the double-dealing terrorist Mossad still said he was. And there would always be another Ismail Sowan ready to be seduced by men in Israel who reveled in broken promises.
For a full week Mossad relaxed, convinced that whatever Sowan told his British interrogators could be shrugged off.
