A secret coalition of western intelligence agencies suppliedIsraelwith crucial information that allowed the Mossad to track and kill Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks in western Europe in the early 1970s, newly declassified documents have revealed.
The support was offered without any oversight by parliaments or elected politicians, and, if not actually illegal, would have caused a public scandal.
Israel’s assassination campaign, conducted by the Mossad, Israel’s principal foreign intelligence service, followed theattack by armed Palestinian militantson the Olympic Games in Munich in September 1972, which led to the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes. At least four Palestinians linked by Israel to terrorism were killed in Paris, Rome, Athens and Nicosia, and another six elsewhere over the rest of the decade.
The mission, which was dubbed Operation Wrath of God by some, inspired Steven Spielberg’s 2005Hollywood film Munich.
Evidence of support from western intelligence services for the Israeli mission was discovered in encrypted cables found in Swiss archives by Dr Aviva Guttmann, a historian of strategy and intelligence at Aberystwyth University.
Thousands of such cables were circulated through a hitherto unknown secret system codenamed Kilowatt, which was set up in 1971 to allow 18 western intelligence services, including those of Israel, the UK, the US, France,Switzerland, Italy and West Germany to share information. The cables circulated raw intelligence with details of safe houses and vehicles, the movements of key individuals seen as dangerous, news on tactics used by Palestinian armed groups, and analysis.
“A lot was very granular, linking individuals to specific attacks and giving details that would be of great help. Perhaps at the very beginning, [western officials] were unaware [of the killings] but afterwards there was a lot of press reporting and other evidence suggesting strongly what the Israelis were doing,” said Guttmann, the first researcher to view Kilowatt material. “They were even sharing the results of their own investigations into the assassinations with the agency – Mossad – which was most likely to have done them.”
Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, demanded that the Mossad show her reliable evidence that any targets were connected to Munich or had a role in the wider wave of attacks by Palestinian armed groups on Israeli planes, embassies and airline offices across western Europe and the Mediterranean at that time. Much of that evidence came from western intelligence services and reached Israel through the Kilowatt network.
The first killing carried out by the Mossad was of a Palestinian intellectual who worked at the Libyan embassy in Rome. Wael Zwaiter was shot dead in the lobby of his apartment block in the Italian capital just weeks after the Munich attack.
Defenders of Zwaiter have always claimed he was wrongly identified as a militant and had no links to terrorism. The Kilowatt cables show Israel had been told several times by western security services that the 38-year-old translator had been providing weapons and logistical support for the Black September Organization (BSO), which was behind the Munich attack and others.
A second victim, Mahmoud al-Hamshari, the official representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization inFrance, was killed in Paris in December 1972. Hamshari also featured in the Kilowatt cables, which described his diplomatic and fundraising activities but also claimed he had recruited terrorist cells.
The assassination in Paris in June 1973 of a key logistician for terrorist plots by the BSO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an armed faction then based in Lebanon, was greatly aided by Swiss authorities, the cables revealed.
Mohamed Boudia, a veteran of the Algerian war of independence against France who had placed his experience as a clandestine operator at the disposal of the PFLP and the BSO, was high on Mossad’s target list. Boudia had organised a series of attacks including an abortive effort to bomb hotels in Israel and the destruction of part of an Italian oil terminal. Other plots targeted Jewish refugees fleeing the Soviet Union and Jordan’s ambassador to London.
Boudia, also a playwright and theatre director, was tracked by the Mossad after Swiss intelligence officials passed on the details of his car discovered when raiding a safe house in Geneva. An Israeli assassination squad tracked the vehicle and killed Boudia with a landmine on a Parisian street.
“I’m not sure the Israeli [assassination] campaign would have been possible without the tactical information from the European intelligence services. Certainly, it was of huge benefit. But it was also very important for the Mossad to know that they had that tacit support,” said Guttmann, who is publishing her research in a book later this year.
In another example revealed by the cables, the British domestic intelligence service MI5 provided the Mossad with its only picture of Ali Hassan Salameh, a key BSO leader who was blamed for the Munich attack.
In July 1973, the Mossad believed it had tracked Salameh to Lillehammer, a small Norwegian ski resort, and used the picture supplied by MI5 to identify its target. The man it shot dead turned out not to be the BSO leader, however, but a Moroccan waiter. Several of the Mossad operatives were detained by Norwegian authorities and the resultant outcry led Meir to wind up the Wrath of God campaign.
Even afterwards though, western European services continued to supply Israel with detailed intelligence on potential targets, Guttmann said.
A former member of the Israeli assassination teams told the Guardian last month that at the time he and other members had no knowledge of the source of the information that identified their targets but insisted he had absolute confidence that it was reliable.
Palestinian former militants told the Guardian last year that they “gave as good as they got” in what was dubbed the “war of the spooks” between the Mossad and the clandestine networks of the PFLP and BSO that was waged across the Mediterranean and western Europe in the early 1970s.
One Israeli agent was killed in Madrid and another badly injured in Brussels by Palestinian armed factions.
Guttmann said the revelations in the Kilowatt cables raised important questions for today’s war in Gaza, which began after the October 7 2023 surprise attack by Hamas in Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and led to 251 hostages being taken. More than 50,000 Palestinians, also mostly civilians, have been killed in the ensuing Israeli offensive.
“When it comes to intelligence-sharing between services of different states, oversight is very difficult. International relations of the secret state are completely off the radar of politicians, parliaments or the public. Even today there will be a lot of information being shared about which we know absolutely nothing,” Guttmann said.
Mossad is believed to have been responsible forkilling the political head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran last year, while other Israeli security agencies have been involved in the assassination of a series of Hamas leaders in Gaza and Beirut. In the last year, Israel also killed the veteran head and dozens of top officials of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist militant organisation.