Mossad agent jailed in Norway for the botched attempt to assassinate a Palestinian terrorist leader
A SOUTH AFRICAN who emigrated to Israel in the 1960s and became a member of Mossad, Sylvia Rafael was to garner far more publicity than the personnel of that secretive agency are meant to, through a famously botched assassination. In 1973 she was arrested in Norway after a Mossad attempt to kill a senior Palestinian Liberation Organisation figure in Lillehammer had identified the wrong target.
The assassination, in reprisal for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games the year before, was aimed at Ali Hassan Salameh, commander of Yassir Arafat’s elite personal security squad, who had been in charge of the Munich operation. In fact, the hapless victim was a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, who was shot in front of his pregnant girlfriend.
The genesis of the Mossad operation was the seizure, on September 5, 1972, at the Olympic village in Munich, of nine members of Israel’s Olympic team and their coaches, as they slept in their athletes’ quarters. Two other Israelis were killed during the attack.
The hostage takers, members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, published a series of demands for the release of more than 200 named prisoners held in jails in Israel and West Germany. They also ordered the German authorities to prepare three aircraft to be ready for takeoff at a nearby military airfield, in one of which they would make their escape to Cairo, where they expected to meet the released prisoners.
Israel immediately offered the services of a crack hostage rescue team to the German authorities, but this was refused. A team of police marksmen was, instead, dispatched to the airfield, but their rudimentary training in this type of operation was to prove tragically inadequate.
Too few snipers had been allocated to fire on all the hostage takers simultaneously, and they lacked such essential equipment as night sights. When, after a day of tense negotiations with the terrorists, the police opened fire in the small hours of September 6, one of the Palestinians was able to lob a grenade into the helicopter in which the hostages were awaiting their liberation. In the ensuing explosion and gunbattle all nine remaining hostages, a German police officer and five of the eight Palestinians were killed.
The magnitude of the German police failure stunned the world. For a short while it was contemplated that the XXth Olympiad might be brought to a close there and then. For their part, the Israelis launched massive retribution, which included airstrikes and ground operations against Palestinian targets in Lebanon and Syria. Not even these measures, however, fully slaked the Israeli thirst for revenge. A top-level committee chaired by Golda Meir, the Prime Minister, assisted by Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Defence, determined to demonstrate that nowhere in the world would be safe for any organiser or abetter of the team that had carried out the Munich atrocity, or even those contemplating terrorist attacks against Israel.
In an operation codenamed “Wrath of God”, teams of Mossad agents were assembled at a secret hideout in Geneva and dispatched to assassinate 35 targets, 11 of whom were connected with the Munich operation. Rafael was attached to the squad which was to kill Salameh, who was believed to have masterminded it.
Born near Cape Town in 1937, she was the daughter of a Jewish father, but non-Jewish mother, and therefore technically not Jewish. But her mother imbued in her a fierce love of Jewish culture, and in 1963 she emigrated to Israel, where she lived on a kibbutz and then worked as a teacher. She later moved to Tel Aviv, where she was recruited by Mossad. After training she attained the highest rank for a Mossad agent — “combattant”, qualified to operate in hostile countries.
She was sent to Paris in the guise of a freelance journalist with a Canadian passport in the name of Patricia Roxburgh. When the Israeli Government decided to track down the Munich terrorists she provided valuable intelligence which led to the killing of three, before being assigned to an Operation Wrath of God team herself.
Although the Mossad teams were given great latitiude in their modus operandi, they were under strict instructions to be 100 per cent sure of identification, and to cause no collateral damage. As target after target was eliminated this brief was rigidly adhered to, but in the case of Salameh things went hopelessly wrong.
Acting on intelligence which had identified the Palestinian as living in Lillehammer, the surveillance team of which Rafael was a member arrived in the town and booked, under assumed names, into the Oppland Tourist Hotel.
Certain that they had identified the right man, they called in the group’s action team. On July 21, 1973, this closed in on Bouchiki as he walked with his pregant girlfriend towards his flat, and shot him dead in the street.
Moving with great speed, the Norwegian police pounced on five members of the Mossad team, as they attempted to leave the country, among them Rafael. Not having been directly involved in the killing, she was charged with second degree murder. Convicted, she was sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
While serving her sentence she was married to her Norwegian defence lawyer, Annaeus Schjodt. Becoming a heroine in Israel she was also adopted by a kibbutz, Ramat Hakovesh, while behind bars. On her release from prison — after serving only 11 months thanks to Israeli diplomatic pressure — she returned to Israel and lived for some time on the kibbutz.
Later, she returned to Norway to live with her husband, but she was always a potential target for Palestinian assassins, and in the early 1990s the pair moved to South Africa, settling in Pretoria, where she died. In the interim, stricken with cancer and wheelchair-bound, she had returned to Ramat Hakovesh, where, she said, she wanted her ashes to be buried. This took place a week after her death, following her Christian cremation in South Africa.
Salameh remained on Mossad’s target list and was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979. It was the last of the “Wrath of God” reprisals.
Sylvia Rafael, Israeli secret agent, was born on April 1, 1937. She died of leukaemia on February 9, 2005, aged 67.
A SOUTH AFRICAN who emigrated to Israel in the 1960s and became a member of Mossad, Sylvia Rafael was to garner far more publicity than the personnel of that secretive agency are meant to, through a famously botched assassination. In 1973 she was arrested in Norway after a Mossad attempt to kill a senior Palestinian Liberation Organisation figure in Lillehammer had identified the wrong target.
The assassination, in reprisal for the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games the year before, was aimed at Ali Hassan Salameh, commander of Yassir Arafat’s elite personal security squad, who had been in charge of the Munich operation. In fact, the hapless victim was a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, who was shot in front of his pregnant girlfriend.
The genesis of the Mossad operation was the seizure, on September 5, 1972, at the Olympic village in Munich, of nine members of Israel’s Olympic team and their coaches, as they slept in their athletes’ quarters. Two other Israelis were killed during the attack.
The hostage takers, members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, published a series of demands for the release of more than 200 named prisoners held in jails in Israel and West Germany. They also ordered the German authorities to prepare three aircraft to be ready for takeoff at a nearby military airfield, in one of which they would make their escape to Cairo, where they expected to meet the released prisoners.
Israel immediately offered the services of a crack hostage rescue team to the German authorities, but this was refused. A team of police marksmen was, instead, dispatched to the airfield, but their rudimentary training in this type of operation was to prove tragically inadequate.
Too few snipers had been allocated to fire on all the hostage takers simultaneously, and they lacked such essential equipment as night sights. When, after a day of tense negotiations with the terrorists, the police opened fire in the small hours of September 6, one of the Palestinians was able to lob a grenade into the helicopter in which the hostages were awaiting their liberation. In the ensuing explosion and gunbattle all nine remaining hostages, a German police officer and five of the eight Palestinians were killed.
The magnitude of the German police failure stunned the world. For a short while it was contemplated that the XXth Olympiad might be brought to a close there and then. For their part, the Israelis launched massive retribution, which included airstrikes and ground operations against Palestinian targets in Lebanon and Syria. Not even these measures, however, fully slaked the Israeli thirst for revenge. A top-level committee chaired by Golda Meir, the Prime Minister, assisted by Moshe Dayan, the Minister of Defence, determined to demonstrate that nowhere in the world would be safe for any organiser or abetter of the team that had carried out the Munich atrocity, or even those contemplating terrorist attacks against Israel.
In an operation codenamed “Wrath of God”, teams of Mossad agents were assembled at a secret hideout in Geneva and dispatched to assassinate 35 targets, 11 of whom were connected with the Munich operation. Rafael was attached to the squad which was to kill Salameh, who was believed to have masterminded it.
Born near Cape Town in 1937, she was the daughter of a Jewish father, but non-Jewish mother, and therefore technically not Jewish. But her mother imbued in her a fierce love of Jewish culture, and in 1963 she emigrated to Israel, where she lived on a kibbutz and then worked as a teacher. She later moved to Tel Aviv, where she was recruited by Mossad. After training she attained the highest rank for a Mossad agent — “combattant”, qualified to operate in hostile countries.
She was sent to Paris in the guise of a freelance journalist with a Canadian passport in the name of Patricia Roxburgh. When the Israeli Government decided to track down the Munich terrorists she provided valuable intelligence which led to the killing of three, before being assigned to an Operation Wrath of God team herself.
Although the Mossad teams were given great latitiude in their modus operandi, they were under strict instructions to be 100 per cent sure of identification, and to cause no collateral damage. As target after target was eliminated this brief was rigidly adhered to, but in the case of Salameh things went hopelessly wrong.
Acting on intelligence which had identified the Palestinian as living in Lillehammer, the surveillance team of which Rafael was a member arrived in the town and booked, under assumed names, into the Oppland Tourist Hotel.
Certain that they had identified the right man, they called in the group’s action team. On July 21, 1973, this closed in on Bouchiki as he walked with his pregant girlfriend towards his flat, and shot him dead in the street.
Moving with great speed, the Norwegian police pounced on five members of the Mossad team, as they attempted to leave the country, among them Rafael. Not having been directly involved in the killing, she was charged with second degree murder. Convicted, she was sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
While serving her sentence she was married to her Norwegian defence lawyer, Annaeus Schjodt. Becoming a heroine in Israel she was also adopted by a kibbutz, Ramat Hakovesh, while behind bars. On her release from prison — after serving only 11 months thanks to Israeli diplomatic pressure — she returned to Israel and lived for some time on the kibbutz.
Later, she returned to Norway to live with her husband, but she was always a potential target for Palestinian assassins, and in the early 1990s the pair moved to South Africa, settling in Pretoria, where she died. In the interim, stricken with cancer and wheelchair-bound, she had returned to Ramat Hakovesh, where, she said, she wanted her ashes to be buried. This took place a week after her death, following her Christian cremation in South Africa.
Salameh remained on Mossad’s target list and was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979. It was the last of the “Wrath of God” reprisals.
Sylvia Rafael, Israeli secret agent, was born on April 1, 1937. She died of leukaemia on February 9, 2005, aged 67.
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