In May 1965, Hassan asked Mossad to help deal with Ben-Barka. The task of evaluating the request was given to David Kimche. Later that month he traveled on his British passport to London. Ostensibly he was on vacation. In reality he was finalizing his plans. Equipped with a perfectly doctored second British passport provided by a sayan, and with a Moroccan visa, Kimche flew to Rome; he spent a day there sightseeing—a move to make sure he was not being followed—and then traveled on to Morocco.
He was met at Rabat Airport by Muhammed Oufkir, the country’s fearsome minister of the interior. That night, over a dinner enlivened by the presence of some of the country’s best belly dancers, Oufkir spelled out what the king wanted: Ben-Barka’s head. Displaying both a crude sense of humor and an appreciation of Jewish history, Oufkir had added: “After all, your Jewish Salome asked your King Herod for the head of a troublemaker.”
Kimche said that while that was indeed correct, it really was not a matter for him. Oufkir would have to come back with him to Israel.
Next day the two men flew to Rome and caught a flight to Tel Aviv. Meir Amit met them in a safe house. He was polite but cautious. He told Kimche he was “not very excited” at the prospect of doing Oufkir’s dirty work and insisted our “involvement would be confined to preparatory work.”
Unknown to Meir Amit, Oufkir had already made an arrangement with a faction within France’s intelligence service, SDECE, to murder Ben-Barka if he could be lured out of his fortresslike home in Geneva and across the Swiss border into France. Still reluctant, Meir Amit had insisted that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol must personally sanction Mossad’s involvement. The prime minister gave it.
Mossad set to work. A Moroccan-born
Mossad’s communications center sent a coded message to Oufkir in Morocco. The following day the minister and a small team of Moroccan security men flew to Paris. That night the minister was briefed by the SDECE faction. Concerned he had been excluded from the meeting, the Mossad agent who had accompanied Ben-Barka to the French capital called Kimche on a secure line for instructions. Kimche consulted Meir Amit. Both agreed, in Amit’s later words, “that something nasty was cooking and we should stay well clear.”
Next evening an SDECE surveillance van was positioned outside when Ben-Barka arrived for dinner at a restaurant in the St. Germaine district. He believed he had come to meet the millionaire. After he waited an hour and still no one had showed, Ben-Barka left the restaurant. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, he was grabbed by two SDECE agents and bundled into the van. It was driven to a villa in the Fontenay-le-Vicomte district that the SDECE used from time to time to interrogate its own suspects. Throughout the night, Oufkir supervised Ben-Barka’s questioning and torture until, at dawn, the broken man was executed. Oufkir photographed the body before it was buried in the villa’s garden. The minister flew home with the film to show the king.
When the corpse was discovered, the outcry in France reached all the way to the president’s palace. Charles de Gaulle ordered an unprecedented investigation that led to a massive purging of the SDECE. Its director, anxious to maintain interservice collegiality, struggled to keep Mossad’s name out of the affair. But de Gaulle, no friend of Israel, was convinced that Mossad was involved. He told aides that the operation bore the “hallmark of Tel Aviv.” Only the Israelis, he had fumed, would show such total disregard for international law. A once-close relationship between Israel and France, established in the 1956 Suez War, was over. De Gaulle promptly ordered that arms supplies to Israel should stop, along with all intelligence cooperation. Meir Amit would “remember the body blows from Paris raining down.”
For Kimche, “It was heroic to see the way Meir Amit handled the situation. He could have tried to blame me or the others involved in the operation. Instead he insisted on taking full responsibility. He was a true leader.”
