![Flag of Norway [Julian-G. Albert/Wikipedia]](https://i0.wp.com/www.middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/2013_7_7-Norway-flag-1.jpg?resize=1200%2C800&quality=85&strip=all&zoom=1&ssl=1)
In the evening hours, on July 21, 1973, two Israeli assassins got ready to kill their target. They drove their white Mazda to a bus stop in a quiet residential neighbourhood in the small town of Lillehammer where the killing would take place. Little did Ahmed Bouchiki, the target, know at that time that he only had minutes left to live.
Bouchiki, a local waiter of Moroccan descent living In Norway, and his wife, Torill, had been to the movies, and were on their way back in a bus, taking them straight to their killers. As they got off the bus, the assassins approached them by foot and soon emptied 16 bullets into Bouchiki's body, as his wife stood helpless by his side.
Then, they disappeared. What had just happened in quiet Lillehammer? Nobody, at first, understood why unknown killers had taken the life of a local waiter working in a public pool. However, due to a series of mistakes on part of the Israelis, six of the Mossad agents got arrested in Oslo. And, after an initial interrogation, the usually so quiet Norway suddenly realised it had become part of an international and, indeed, brutal spy drama of the worst sort.
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Munich
And this is the narrative the world has been told throughout the years following the attack in 1973, a narrative that now will be challenged: Back in 1972, during the summer Olympics in West Germany, a Palestinian group called Black September kidnapped Israelis athletes inside the Olympic village while the games were still ongoing. The hostage drama was broadcast on TV screens across the world. Black September was an organisation connected to Fatah, established for militant activity that Fatah could deny being behind.
German Special Forces, at one point, tried to rescue the Israelis, but failed, leaving 17 people dead, 11 Israelis, five Palestinian and a German – in what became known as the Munich massacre.
Revenge
Back in Israel, people were in shock after Munich. Prime Minister, Golda Meir, quickly summoned her intelligence officials and instructed them to hunt down and kill the Palestinians behind the attack. And soon, Palestinians started dying in capitals across Europe, in Rome, in Paris, in Nicosia.
And then, in July of 1973, an intelligence source told the Israelis that their most wanted man, The Red Prince, Beirut-based Ali Hassan Salame, was about to travel to Scandinavia. According to the Israelis, Salame had been the brain behind the Black September attack.
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Mossad got into action. In order to get their hands on the illusive Red Prince, their agents traced another man, Algerian Kemal Benamane, who they believed was about to meet Salame. Benamane indeed travelled to Copenhagen, then to Oslo and, in the end, to the remote town of Lillehammer.
In Lillehammer, Benamane met twice with local waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, and then left the place. Consequently, the heads of the Mossad were convinced they had found the secret hideout of the Red Prince, and ordered their assassins to kill the man, the uninvolved waiter.
Secret diplomacy
But 50 years later, Bassam Abu Sharif, a long-time Palestinian leader and also a close friend of Ali Hassan Salame, now disputes this official narrative: The Israelis did not want to kill Salame because of Munich. Salame was not at all involved in Munich. I know that very well, and also the Israelis knew that, Abu Sharif tells us, while we sit in his living room in the Israeli-occupied city of Jericho.
Abu Sharif was definitely in the inner circle of the Palestinian leadership. He was one of the heads of the PFLP, the People's Front for Liberation of Palestine, and also became one of Yasser Arafat's closest advisors. For decades, he participated in shaping Palestinian history, especially in issues connected to foreign relations.
In the 70s, the Palestinians were more aligned with the Soviet Union and the East Block than the West. Arafat realised he needed a channel of communication with Washington, with the US. And he concluded that the best way to establish such a channel would be through the CIA. Arafat gave Salame the task of establishing this connection, Abu Sharif recalls.
Salame quickly established a close working relation with Beirut-based CIA agent, Robert Ames. Back in those days, Washington did not allow contact with "Palestinian terrorists", but this liaison was given the green light by none other than top diplomat, Henry Kissinger. Ames and Salame even became close personal friends.
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Israel, however, discovered the secret channel between the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and Washington, and felt betrayed by Washington's willingness to engage so-called Palestinian terrorists. And that is when, says Abu Sharif, Israel decided to kill Ali Hassan Salame, to break the channel that connected the PLO and Washington.
By that time, the Israelis had already tried to kill Abu Sharif himself. While Salame was a bit of a playboy in the heydays of Beirut, the Paris of the Middle East, Abu Sharif was more of an intellectual, with a special fascination with Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who had been executed in Bolivia a few years earlier.
One day in 1972, a book arrives at Abu Sharif's office in Beirut, a book about Che Guevara. When he opens it, the parcel explodes, injuring one eye, one ear and cutting off several fingers. In 1979, the Israelis eventually did manage to kill Salame – with a car bomb that exploded as the Red Prince drove through the streets of Beirut.
From Israel's point of view, the assassination of Salame was a success. Contact between the Palestinians and Washington was undermined and cut, and, only more than a decade later, in the 90s, was Arafat given access to the White House, also then due to an event in Norway, this time the so-called Oslo peace process.
Not mistaken identification
While Abu Sharif challenges the motive behind the killing of Salame, a senior Mossad official who participated in the Lillehammer debacle, is now challenging a basic tenet of the established narrative, that Ahmed Bouchiki was killed due to a mistaken identification. Dan Arbel, who was jailed for two years in Norway after his arrest, insists the agents on the ground did warn the heads of the Mossad that the man in Lillehammer did not at all resemble the photograph they had of Salame.
I said very clearly "it wasn't him". But Mike was sure it was Salame, he had gotten a tip-off that Salame was going to be there. It was as if he said I know better, and you know nothing, Arbel tells us. Mike Harari was the top Mossad official involved in the operation. And, despite opposition from the agents on the ground, the Mossad leadership nevertheless ordered their assassins to kill the wrong man, Bouchiki.
Arbel is today 85 years old, and works as a security guard outside a supermarket in Tel Aviv. Noam Tepper, an Israeli intelligence expert and an author of a book about the Lillehammer affair, agrees with Arbel, and says that the killing in Norway was not at all an outcome of mistaken identification, but rather the result of a wrong decision amongst the Mossad leaders.
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Tepper tells us that all the agents on the ground, except for one, told their superiors that Bouchiki did not resemble Salame. The Swedish-speaking agent, Marianne Gladnikoff, heard Bouchiki speak Norwegian, and she knew that Salame did not speak the language. Top spy, Sylvia Rafael, with years of experience as an agent in Arab countries, observed that Bouchiki behaved as if he was well acquainted with his surroundings in Lillehammer, as if he was a local, something Salame obviously was not, Tepper tells us in an interview.
The only one who did believe Bouchiki was Salame was Nehemia Ben Meir, the Mossad agent who, 13 years earlier, had identified Nazi leader, Adolf Eichmann, in Argentina. But, despite the opposition of most of the agents, the heads of the Mossad still ordered a killing, Tepper says, probably due to a certain arrogance. If he wasn't a big terrorist like Salame, he was certainly a small terrorist, Tepper says about the Mossad heads' thinking. With that decision, an oblivious 30-year old local waiter was, out of the blue, killed in Lillehammer by assassins who had travelled more than 5000 kilometres to kill the wrong man.
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