The Golem of Avenue Louise

File reference 72/G/291. Target package was one Hamdi Abed, a PLO ‘fixer’ who moved money and materiel from Bulgaria to the Low Countries under cover of a used-car import business. The operational directive from Mossad was simple: liquidate. Abed was to be ambushed outside his apartment on the Avenue Louise in Brussels. The katsas assigned, however, were not the usual Kidon professionals. They were a budget team, hastily assembled, drawn from the ranks of desk-job analysts who had somehow passed their marksmanship qualifications. The plan was to shoot Abed, grab his briefcase—intelligence assumed it held Fatah ledgers—and disappear.

The plan survived contact with reality for approximately four seconds. Abed, it turned out, was not simply a money man. He was a paranoid money man who had spent his own funds on three Moroccan bodyguards with whom he conducted all business in a moving car. When the Mossad team’s Ford Cortina blocked his vehicle, Abed did not step out as predicted. He hunkered down as his security detail opened fire with cheap Polish submachine guns. The Mossad agents, whose combined field experience consisted of one weekend training exercise in the Negev, replied with their issued Berettas. Ten seconds of truly ap-palling marksmanship ensued, during which 97 rounds were discharged, every window in the block was shattered, and both cars were rendered inoperable. The only fatality was a prize-winning poodle named François.

The briefcase, however, was successfully retrieved. Except it was not the target’s briefcase. In the chaos, the katsas had grabbed their own field case, containing 500,000 Deutsche Marks in operational ‘black’ funds. Abed and his men, having suppressed the ambush, collected the Mossad case full of money, abandoned their shot-up Mercedes, and vanished into the Brussels metro. Abed, a man whose entire career was based on recognizing an opportunity, did not report the windfall to his superiors in Beirut. He understood this was not Fatah money. This was a gift from God. Or at least, from a comically inept Zionist God.

He used it to establish a rogue splinter cell, the “Martyrs of François,” named, in a fit of pique, after the dog he had been forced to witness perish. This cell, funded entirely by Mossad’s own black budget, became a persistent irritation to both Israeli intelligence and the Fatah leadership for the next five years. They specialized not in terror, but in exquisitely targeted acts of bureaucratic sabotage. Forging water bills for Israeli embassies, reporting Mossad safe houses for zoning violations, subscribing every known Sayeret Matkal officer to pornographic magazines. Abed’s masterwork was impersonating the Israeli Defence Minister on a phone call and successfully ordering 200 gross of rubber chickens to be delivered to a military intelligence headquarters north of Tel Aviv. The operation was only wound down when Abed, attempting to bribe a Belgian official to declare the Israeli embassy a public toilet, was arrested for unrelated tax fraud. His final report to his non-existent superiors was a single line: “The chickens have landed.”