Author faults Israel for 1979 killing of CIA asset

 

By Donald H. Harrison

ENCINITAS, California – A Pulitzer Prize winning historian told attendees of the Jewish Book Fair at Temple Solel here that Israel’s Mossad was wrong in 1979 to assassinate P.L.O. intelligence chief Ali Hassan Salameh notwithstanding the fact that he was suspected of helping to mastermind the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972  Munich Olympics.

Kai Bird, author of The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, explained during a book talk on Sunday, Nov. 9, there there was no proof Salameh had played a role in the killing of the 11 athletes.  Furthermore, Bird said, after those Olympics, Salameh had become a source of intelligence whom Ames and his colleagues at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) believed could influence Yassir Arafat to moderate his stance from one calling for the elimination of Israel from the Middle East to one favoring a two-state solution.

Bird, who had won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize along with Martin J. Sherwin for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, said the famous handshake in 1993 on the White House lawn between Arafat and an Israeli Prime Minister (Yitzhak Rabin) might have come a decade earlier if Menachem Begin, who was the Israeli prime minister in 1979, had not authorized the Mossad to kill Salameh by car bombing.

Salameh, said Bird, by 1979 “was no longer a ticking bomb; he was no longer involved with terrorist operations in Europe; he was no longer involved in the ‘war of the spooks,’ as it is called, with Mossad assassinating PLO operatives in Beirut, Rome and Paris, and the PLO doing the same at Mossad offices here and there in Europe.”

While Salameh never worked directly for the CIA, he had been cultivated as a friend by Ames, who was a key CIA operative in the Middle East and one of the few American spies who could actually read and speak Arabic, according to Bird.  Ames was killed with 62 others  in 1983 when the U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed by forces believed aligned with Iran.

Besides the Mossad, Bird said the CIA shared some blame for Salameh’s assassination.  “My sources said it was a mistake on the part of the CIA not to mention it, not to have gone to the Mossad and said ‘he’s our man, you can’t touch him.’”  He said one reason the CIA did not communicate this to the Mossad was that “they might have turned around and leaked this information on the streets of Beirut, making Ali Hassan the target of his own people, who were critics of the moderates, so to speak.”

Ames’ cultivation of the PLO intelligence chief at a time when official U.S. policy was to have absolutely no contact with the P.LO. and Salameh’s subsequent assassination constitute an important  portion of Bird’s book on Ames, whom he called “the good spy,” in part because, contrary to movie images of hard-drinking,sexually promiscuous spies, Ames led a quiet, almost dull married life, raising six children. Bird said the CIA gave him no help researching the book, but that Ames’ widow shared Ames’ personal letters and notes with him.  Bird’s father had been an American mid-level diplomat in the Middle East, and at one time his family lived on the same street in Saudi Arabia as the Ames family had.

Asked if he agreed with Ames that Israel was the “heavy” for the lack of peace in the Middle East, Bird said that he did agree.  “Israel is the heavy in the Middle East,” he told the American Jewish audience.  “It is powerful.  It has the most powerful military capabilities.  It is in control of events. “

He added:  “Israel has got a dilemma, to put it mildly.  They have had more than 60 years and there still is no peace with their neighbors, and as the last Gaza War proved, their neighbors are still angry and they are getting more sophisticated with their attacks. They now have missiles, the missiles in the next war will be even better.  They (Israelis) have a demographic problem in the territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. There are now six million or more Palestinians and six million or more Jewish Israelis in that land. If you want one state you are going to have to give everyone a vote, and it going to be a different kind of Israel.  If don’t want one state and you want a two-state solution, then you have to quickly do something, because the demographics are exploding.”

Another questioner asked if the Palestinians ever really will support peace.  What choice does Israel have? asked the questioner.

Bird responded that the PLO has evolved from the days of its beginnings to now.  “Their official position is two states,” he said.  He stated that a majority of Palestinians and a majority of Israelis are ready for two states, “but extremists on both sides are in command of the events in general.  So when Hamas comes along and has a terrorist act, extremists on the Israeli side take advantage of this to say ‘this is the reason for no compromise and we have to build more settlements.’”

The author also said that Hamas had been losing favor with ordinary Gazans before the most recent war, but by standing up to Israel Hamas restored its credibility.

“A majority of Palestinians know what should happen,” he said.  “They all know, and yet ware not making it happen, and that is the definition of a tragedy.”

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com  The book fair continues through Nov. 10 at Temple Solel, then transfers from Nov. 13 through Nov. 16 to the Lawrence Family JCC.