Ali Hassan Salameh (, ; 1 April 1941 – 22 January 1979) was a Palestinian militant who was the chief of operations for the Black September Organization and founder of Force 17. He was assassinated in January 1979 as part of an assassination campaign by Mossad.

Biography

Ali Hassan Salameh was born on 1 April 1941 in Qula, Mandatory Palestine to a wealthy family. He was the son of Shaykh Hassan Salameh, who was killed in action by the Israeli army during the 1948 Palestine war near Lydda. Ali Salameh was educated in Germany and is thought to have received his military training in Cairo and Moscow. After the Munich massacre during the 1972 Olympic Games, he was hunted by the Israeli Mossad during its assassination campaign. In 1973, Mossad agents killed an innocent Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, in what became known as the Lillehammer affair in Norway, mistaking Bouchiki for Salameh, and resulting in the arrest of some of the Israeli agents.

As a result of the failure in Lillehammer and his alleged CIA protection, Salameh felt relatively safe. Having lived under cover in various parts of the Middle East and Europe, in 1978, he married Georgina Rizk, a Lebanese celebrity who had been Miss Universe seven years earlier. The couple spent their honeymoon in Hawaii and then stayed at Disneyland in California. Their son Ali Salameh is a political science graduate who studied in Canada. By a prior marriage he was a grandson-in-law of Mohammad Amin al-Husayni. He had two sons from his first marriage to Um Hassan.

Salameh served as the key bridge between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1970 until his death after being recruited as a CIA asset by Robert Ames. The PLO, at the request of the US, had undertaken steps to help ensure the security of both the US Embassy—Salameh responded by posting a PLO guard unit there—and, more generally, American citizens resident in Lebanon. The contacts later developed more extensively as the PLO offered its intelligence assistance in regard to larger regional issues. The US had undertaken with Israel to avoid contacts with the PLO, but US security interests under Gerald Ford, on the advice of Henry Kissinger, enabled an unofficial relationship which, when discovered by Israel, deeply disturbed Israeli officials. When asked by the Israelis, US officials denied the relationship. The desire to disrupt the channels between the US and the PLO was one of the motivations behind his assassination. As many as fourteen Mossad agents were involved in the operation. One of the agents believed to be involved was Erika Chambers, who arrived in Beirut in October 1978 posing as an NGO staffer wishing to assist Palestinian orphans. She rented a flat overlooking Salameh's apartment. Two other agents involved in the operation using the aliases Peter Scriver and Roland Kolberg entered Lebanon on British and Canadian passports respectively. Chambers was on her balcony painting, with the Volkswagen parked below on Rue Verdun (an upscale commercial and residential street in Beirut). As Salameh's convoy passed the Volkswagen at 3:35 pm and turned onto Rue Madame Curie, 100 kg of explosive attached to the car by a fellow Mossad agent was remotely exploded, Salameh's four bodyguards were also killed in the explosion. Four bystanders were also killed.

  • Ali Hassan Salameh was featured in the plot of the Steven Spielberg film Munich as one of the assassination targets. He is seen twice portrayed by Mehdi Nebbou, but was not assassinated until after the events of the film.
  • He appears as the character named Jamal Ramlawi in the spy novel Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius, a thinly disguised account of his recruitment by the CIA.
  • He is briefly mentioned in the Robert Ludlum novel The Janson Directive, where his alleged links to the CIA are cited as an example of shady deals the United States makes.
  • Daniel Silva borrowed from the exploits of Ali Hassan Salameh and his relatives to create the background for his fictional spy novel Prince of Fire, 2005.
  • Ali Hassan Salameh is repeatedly referenced in the book By Way of Deception by Victor Ostrovsky in his account of his own recruitment and training to become an officer in Mossad.
  • Salameh is played by Daniel Alfie and is centrally featured as a target in the 1986 Canadian made for TV film Sword of Gideon, an earlier production that tells essentially the same story and which used the same source material as Speilberg's later theatrical film Munich.

Bibliography

  • which includes black-and-white photographic plates and which also include Yasser Arafat, together with an index.

See also

  • Yuval Aviv

References