Western intelligence agencies secretly banded together to supply Israel with critical information that helped the Mossad track and eliminate Palestinian terror suspects involved in attacks across Western Europe in the early 1970s, according to newly declassified information revealed by The Guardian on Wednesday.
The support was provided without input or oversight from parliaments or elected officials in the participating countries.
Israel’s targeted assassination campaign followed the murder of 11 Israeli athletes by armed Palestinian terrorists during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. At least four terrorists linked to the attack were later tracked and killed in Paris, Rome, Athens, and Nicosia, with at least six more killed in the following decade.
The mission, known as Operation Wrath of God, gained wider public awareness following its portrayal in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 film Munich.
According to the report, Western support for the Israeli operation was uncovered in encrypted intelligence cables found in Swiss archives by Dr. Aviva Guttmann, a historian of strategy and intelligence at Aberystwyth University.
Thousands of intelligence cables had been exchanged via a covert network called “Kilowatt,” a secret platform established in 1971 to enable collaboration among 18 Western intelligence agencies, including those of Israel, the UK, the US, France, Switzerland, Italy, and West Germany.
These cables contained raw intelligence such as safe house locations, vehicle details, surveillance of individuals deemed dangerous, Palestinian group tactics, and operational analysis.
“A lot was very granular, linking individuals to specific attacks and giving details that would be of great help. Perhaps at the very beginning, [Western officials] were unaware [of the killings], but afterwards there was a lot of press reporting and other evidence suggesting strongly what the Israelis were doing,” said Guttmann, who was the first researcher to access Kilowatt materials. “They were even sharing the results of their own investigations into the assassinations with the agency—Mossad—which was most likely to have done them.”
According to the report, when then-Prime Minister Golda Meir demanded reliable proof linking each assassination target to the Munich massacre or other attacks on Israeli embassies, airline offices, and planes, much of the supporting intelligence came through the Kilowatt network.
Who were some of the targets attained by the Mossad?
The campaign’s first target was Wael Zwaiter, a Palestinian academic working at the Libyan Embassy in Rome. He was gunned down in his apartment building’s lobby just weeks after Munich. Though some have claimed Zwaiter was misidentified, Kilowatt intelligence allegedly linked him to weapons transfers for the Black September Organization (BSO).
Subsequent targets included Mahmoud al-Hamshari, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s representative in France, who was killed by a bomb planted in his Paris apartment in December 1972, and another operative responsible for logistical planning for both BSO and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who was assassinated in cooperation with Swiss authorities in mid-1973.
Another high-priority target was Mohamed Boudia, a veteran of the Algerian war of independence who applied his experience as a clandestine operator to the PFLP and BSO. Boudia helped orchestrate attacks including an attempted bombing campaign in Israeli hotels and an explosion at an Italian oil terminal. Additional plots targeted Jewish refugees fleeing the Soviet Union and even Jordan’s ambassador to London.
Boudia, also a playwright and theater director, was ultimately tracked by Mossad after Swiss authorities raided a Geneva safe house and passed along the registration of his vehicle. Israeli agents used the information to locate him in Paris, where they killed him with a landmine planted beneath his car.
“I’m not sure the Israeli assassination campaign would have been possible without the tactical information from European intelligence services. Certainly, it was of huge benefit. But it was also very important for the Mossad to know that they had that tacit support,” Guttmann said. Her findings will be detailed in a forthcoming book.
In another striking example, British domestic intelligence agency MI5 provided Mossad with what was then the only known photograph of Ali Hassan Salameh, a senior BSO commander believed to be the mastermind of the Munich attack.
In July 1973, Mossad operatives mistakenly used that photo to identify a man believed to be Salameh in Lillehammer, Norway. The agents killed the man, who turned out to be a Moroccan waiter with no connection to terrorism. The botched operation, which led to several Israeli agents being arrested, created an international uproar and prompted Prime Minister Meir to shut down Operation Wrath of God.
A member of one of the Israeli assassination teams told The Guardian last month that the operatives themselves had no knowledge of the intelligence’s origin but trusted its accuracy completely.
Former Palestinian terrorists told The Guardian last year that they “gave as good as they got” in what became known as a “war of the spooks” between Mossad and the clandestine networks of the PFLP and BSO across Europe and the Mediterranean. Several Israeli agents were killed or wounded in retaliatory attacks, including one killed in Madrid and another seriously injured in Brussels.
Guttmann said the Kilowatt revelations raise timely questions in light of the current war in Gaza, which began after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel that left 1,200 people dead—mostly civilians—and 251 taken hostage.
“When it comes to intelligence-sharing between services of different states, oversight is very difficult,” she said. “International relations of the secret state are completely off the radar of politicians, parliaments, or the public. Even today, there will be a lot of information being shared about which we know absolutely nothing.”
The Mossad is widely believed to have assassinated Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran last year. Other Israeli agencies have taken part in the targeted killing of Hamas leaders in Gaza and Beirut, as well as in the elimination of senior Hezbollah officials in Lebanon over the past year.
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