Information on Western assistance to Mossad in tracking down and eliminating Palestinian terrorists has been declassified

A secret coalition of Western intelligence agencies provided Israel with crucial information that allowed the Mossad to track down and kill Palestinians suspected of involvement in terrorist attacks in Western Europe in the early 1970s, newly declassified documents show.

This support was provided without any oversight from parliaments or elected politicians and, if it were not effectively illegal, would have caused a public scandal, The Guardian points out.

Israel's assassination campaign, carried out by the Mossad, Israel's main foreign intelligence service, followed the September 1972 terrorist attack by armed Palestinian militants on the Munich Olympics, which killed 11 Israeli athletes. At least four Palestinians linked - in Israel's view - to terrorism were killed in Paris, Rome, Athens and Nicosia, and six more elsewhere over the rest of the decade. The mission, dubbed by some as Operation Wrath of God, inspired Steven Spielberg's 2005 Hollywood film Munich.

Evidence of Western intelligence support for the Israeli mission has been uncovered 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 transmitted through a previously unknown secret system code-named "Kilowatt," which was set up in 1971 to allow 18 Western intelligence agencies, including Israel, Britain, the United States, France, Switzerland, Italy and West Germany, to share information. The cables disseminated raw intelligence with details of safe houses and vehicles, the movements of key individuals considered dangerous, news of tactics used by Palestinian armed groups and analytical materials.

“A lot of it was very detailed, linking individuals to specific attacks and providing details that could have been very helpful. Western officials may not have known about the killings at the beginning, but there were a lot of press reports and other evidence that came out that strongly suggested what the Israelis were doing,” said Guttmann, the first researcher to review the Kilowatt materials. “They even shared their own investigations into the killings with the Mossad, which was likely the agency that carried them out.”

Golda Meir, the Israeli prime minister, demanded that the Mossad provide her with credible evidence that any of the targets were linked to Munich or were part of a wider wave of attacks by Palestinian militant groups on Israeli aircraft, embassies and airline offices across Western Europe and the Mediterranean at the time. Much of this evidence was obtained from Western intelligence services and was passed to Israel via the Kilowatt network.

The first assassination carried out by the Mossad was that of a Palestinian intellectual working at the Libyan embassy in Rome. Wael Zwaiter was shot dead in the lobby of his apartment building in the Italian capital just weeks after the Munich attacks.

Zwaiter's defenders have always maintained that he was wrongly identified as a militant and had no connection to terrorism. Declassified files show that Western security services repeatedly told Israel that the 38-year-old translator supplied weapons and logistical support to the Black September organization behind the Munich and other attacks.

The second victim, Mahmoud al-Hamshari, the PLO's official representative in France, was assassinated in Paris in December 1972. Hamshari also figured in cables describing his diplomatic and fundraising activities, but also alleged that he recruited terrorist cells.

The cables said that Swiss authorities had provided significant assistance in the assassination in Paris in June 1973 of a key organizer of the Black September terrorist plots and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an armed group then based in Lebanon.

Mohammed Boudia, a veteran of the Algerian War of Independence against France who turned his expertise as an undercover agent over to the PFLP and Black September, was high on the Mossad’s list of targets. Boudia orchestrated a series of attacks, including a failed attempt to blow up hotels in Israel and destroy part of an Italian oil terminal. Other plots targeted Jewish refugees emigrating from the Soviet Union and the Jordanian ambassador to London.

Boudia, also a playwright and theatre director, was tracked down by the Mossad after Swiss intelligence agents passed on information about his car, which had been found during a search of a safe house in Geneva. An Israeli assassination team tracked down the car and blew Boudia up on a mine on a Paris street.

“I’m not sure the Israeli assassination campaign would have been possible without the tactical information from the European intelligence services. It certainly helped enormously. But it was also very important for the Mossad to know that they had this tacit support,” Guttman says.

In another example revealed in the cables, Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5 provided Mossad with its only photograph of Ali Hassan Salameh, a key Black September leader blamed for the Munich bombing.

In July 1973, Mossad believed it had tracked Salameh to Lillehammer, a small Norwegian ski resort, and used a photograph provided by MI5 to identify its target. However, the man he shot was not the terrorist leader, but a Moroccan waiter. Several Mossad agents were detained by Norwegian authorities, and the resulting protests forced Meir to end the Wrath of God campaign.

Even after that, however, Western European services continued to supply Israel with detailed intelligence on potential targets, Guttman emphasizes.

A former member of the Israeli assassination team told the Guardian last month that at the time he and other members of the group were unaware of the source of the information that identified their targets, but insisted he was absolutely confident in its reliability.

Former Palestinian militants told the Guardian last year that they “did the best they could” in the so-called “ghost war” between the Mossad and the PFLP and Black September underground networks that raged across the Mediterranean and western Europe in the early 1970s.

One Israeli agent was killed in Madrid and another was seriously wounded in Brussels by Palestinian armed groups.

Guttmann notes that the new findings raise important questions about today's war in Gaza, which began with Hamas's surprise attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that left 1,200 people, mostly civilians, dead and 251 hostages taken. More than 50,000 Palestinians, also mostly civilians, were killed in the subsequent Israeli offensive.

"When it comes to intelligence sharing between services of different states, control is very difficult. The international relations of a secret state remain completely outside the view of politicians, parliaments or the public. Even today, a lot of information will be disseminated about which we know absolutely nothing," Guttmann states.

The Mossad is believed to be responsible for the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last year, while other Israeli security services have been involved in the killing of a number of Hamas leaders in Gaza and Beirut. Last year, Israel also killed the veteran head and dozens of senior officials of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist militant organization.