Playing God: Mossad’s Murder of Achmed Bouchiki

On the evening of 21 July 1973, in the quiet Norwegian town of Lillehammer, a couple walked home from the cinema. The woman was seven months pregnant and was walking slowly when a grey Volvo stopped nearby. Two hitmen from Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence agency, emerged and shot the man in the torso and head before leaving as quickly as they had come.

The man killed that night was Achmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter and cleaner, who – apart from looking similar to the alleged terrorist Ali Hassan Salameh – had nothing to do with Middle Eastern terrorism. Mossad initially thought that they had achieved a major success as part of ‘Operation Wrath of God’, a retribution campaign initiated by the Israeli government in reaction to the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre, in which members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September abducted and then killed 11 Israeli athletes. But instead of killing the alleged mastermind behind the Munich attack, they had committed one of Mossad’s worst blunders, embarrassing the agency for years to come and triggering an international crisis known as the Lillehammer affair.

How did this happen? The assassination mission was approved in haste and based on a single picture of Ali Hassan Salameh, which Mossad officers had held up to Bouchiki before deciding to go ahead with the assassination. The picture had been given to Mossad by the British domestic intelligence agency MI5. Since 1971 the two agencies had been part of the Club de Berne, a covert intelligence-sharing group, established in 1969 by the heads of eight Western European domestic intelligence agencies. Throughout the 1970s the Club de Berne hosted an encrypted telecommunication channel that established a straight line directly between 18 agencies, including extra-European partners such as Mossad and the FBI. The codeword used for this secret correspondence was ‘Kilowatt’. To date some 40,000 documents from the Kilowatt files have been released and are accessible to the public in the Swiss Federal Archives. These include finished analytical products but also so-called ‘raw intelligence’, reports that came straight from an agency’s sources, most often spies or other informants. The files show that Kilowatt members shared large amounts of information about Palestinians. Not only did this help to anticipate and thwart terrorist plots, but it also supported Mossad’s covert assassination operation.

European partners helped Mossad locate terrorist suspects, initially – as becomes clear from Kilowatt correspondence – without knowing that Israel was planning to kill them. After every assassination in Europe, the respective intelligence agencies then reported to the Club de Berne about the case, shared detailed police reports, and provided regular updates about the ongoing criminal investigations.

That intelligence agencies such as the French Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST) or Italian Servizio Informazioni Difesa (SID) were willing to send police findings to the very intelligence agency that had committed the crime sent a message that Europe would continue to ‘look the other way’ and tacitly accept Mossad eliminating Palestinians on their territory. For instance, after the assassination by car bomb of Mohamed Boudia, a key figure in Palestinian terrorism, in Paris in June 1973, the DST sent a report to its European and Israeli partners. In it, they mentioned various possibilities for Boudia’s death, including an accidental explosion and a possible Palestinian feud – with no mention of Mossad, even though by this point their involvement was known to most people; the day following the assassination, the French newspaper Le Monde blamed Mossad. Furthermore, Swiss intelligence had been particularly useful in the planning of Boudia’s assassination: it had helped to identify his routine, cover names he travelled under, addresses in Paris, and, crucially, details about the car he was driving. Mossad was then able to place a bomb in the car. Wrath of God is often seen as an Israeli operation, but it could not have succeeded without the European agencies that actively supported it.

Following the Lillehammer affair, Operation Wrath of God was suspended for several years. The incident and public trial of the six Mossad officers involved caused an outpouring of international outrage and hostile press towards Israel, and diplomatic relations with Western Europe were embittered. While Norway publicly showed outrage and refused to cover up the story, it also showed relative leniency towards Israel. In February 1974 the Norwegian court ruled that Mossad was responsible for the murder. Five of the six agents were sentenced to prison, with terms ranging from one to five and a half years. However, after 22 months all were pardoned, probably through a secret Israeli-Norwegian deal.

Other Western European states also showed solidarity with Israel. During the course of the trial in 1974 the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) demanded that investigations into the unresolved murders of Palestinians in France and Italy be reopened, but both governments ignored these requests. In Kilowatt intelligence exchanges, cooperation continued unchanged even though their governments faced an official diplomatic crisis and despite the obvious truth that their intelligence had facilitated Mossad’s killing mission. The exposure of Operation Wrath of God had no effect among the Kilowatt group.

The files thus give insights into a parallel security order. Away from public scrutiny and oversight, intelligence agencies were free to pursue their own foreign political agenda. In the 1970s, for example, while MI5 exchanged information daily with Mossad about Palestinian groups, including the whereabouts of Palestinians who could be put on an Israeli kill list, Whitehall applied a very critical foreign policy towards Israel. During the October 1973 ‘Yom Kippur’ War, prime minister Edward Heath refused to supply spare parts for Israel’s Centurion tanks or to provide landing rights to US military supply planes on their way to Israel. Since the early 1970s the UK’s Middle Eastern policy has had the explicit aim of providing ‘a “personality” for the Palestinian people’ – a policy that would ensure the Palestinians had a stake in a future Middle East settlement without clearly mentioning an independent state. Yet when it is assumed that an action can be kept secret and plausibly denied, agencies can, and do, act in disregard of political or ethical considerations. 
 

Aviva Guttmann is Lecturer in Strategy and Intelligence at Aberystwyth University and the author of Operation Wrath of God: The Secret History of European Intelligence and Mossad’s Assassination Campaign (Cambridge University Press, 2025).