Rafi Eitan returned to Tel Aviv and made his plans. Three Mossad agents who could pass for Arabs crossed into Lebanon and entered the city. One rented a car. The second wired a series of bombs into its chassis, roof, and door panels. The third agent parked the car along the route the Red Prince traveled to his office every morning. Using precise timings Rafi Eitan had provided, the car was set to explode as Salameh passed. It did, blowing him to pieces.
Rafi Eitan had shown he was once more a player in the Israeli intelligence community. But Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided that Rafi Eitan was too valuable to risk on further such adventures. He told his adviser that from now on he must remain in the office and keep a low profile. Recently, John le Carré had used Eitan as a model for the central character who tracks down terrorists in his thriller
But lending credibility to a novelist’s imagination did little to settle Rafi Eitan’s perpetual restlessness. He wanted to be where the action was, not stuck behind a desk or attending an endless round of planning meetings. He began to badger Prime Minister Begin to give him something else to do.
After some hesitation—for Rafi Eitan was an excellent adviser on counterterrorism—Begin appointed Rafi Eitan to one of the most sensitive posts in the intelligence community, one that would stretch him intellectually and satisfy his craving for a hands-on job. He was made director of the Bureau of Scientific Liaison, known by its Hebrew acronym, LAKAM.
Created in 1960, it had operated as the defense ministry’s spy unit to obtain scientific data “by all means possible.” In principle that had meant stealing or bribing people to provide material. From the beginning LAKAM had been hampered by the hostility of Mossad, who saw the unit as the proverbial “new kid on the block.” Both Isser Harel and Meir Amit had tried to have LAKAM either closed down or absorbed into Mossad. But Shimon Peres, Israel’s deputy defense minister, had stubbornly insisted that the defense ministry needed its own collecting agency. Slowly and laboriously, LAKAM had gone about its business, setting up offices in New York, Washington, Boston, and Los Angeles, all key centers for cutting-edge science. Every week LAKAM staff dutifully shipped boxes of technical journals back to Israel, knowing the FBI was keeping an eye on their activities.
This surveillance increased after 1968, when one of the engineers building the French Mirage IIIC fighter aircraft was discovered to have stolen over two hundred thousand blueprints. He received a four-and-a-half-year prison sentence—having given LAKAM the data to build its own Mirage replicas. Since then LAKAM had enjoyed little other success.
For Rafi Eitan, the memory of the Mirage coup was the deciding factor. What had been achieved before could be achieved again. He would take a now virtually moribund LAKAM and turn it into a force to be reckoned with.
Working out of cramped offices in a Tel Aviv backwater, he told his new staff, awed at now being commanded by such a legendary figure, that what he knew about science he could place in a test tube and still leave plenty of space. But, he added, he was a fast learner.
He immersed himself in the world of science, looking for potential areas to target. He left his home before dawn and often returned close to midnight with bundles of technical papers and read into the small hours; there was little time to relax by sculpting scrap metal. In between the huge amounts of data he absorbed, he reestablished contact with his old service. Mossad now had a new director, Nahum Admoni. Like Rafi Eitan, Admoni had a deep-seated suspicion of U.S. intentions in the Middle East. Outwardly, Washington continued to show an open commitment to Israel, and the CIA had kept open the back-channel contact Isser Harel and Allen Dulles had instigated. But Admoni complained that the information from that source was of little importance.
The Mossad chief was also concerned about reports from Mossad’s own katsas and well-placed sayanim in Washington. They had discovered discreet meetings between high-ranking State Department officials and Arab leaders close to Yasser Arafat who had discussed ways to pressure Israel to be more accommodating over Palestinian demands. Admoni told Rafi Eitan he now felt he could no longer regard the United States as “a foul weather friend.”
This attitude was reinforced in an incident that would shock American belief in its inviolability more than anything since the Vietnam War.
