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Raid on the Sun(19)

By:Rodger W. Claire


“I think they are CIA,” he told his wife.

“You fool!” Samira cried. “What do the Americans care about any of this? You have been duped by Israelis!”

Stunned and nauseous with the sudden epiphany, Halim realized his wife was right. In the days following her return, he discreetly wrapped up his affairs, packed up all their belongings, and bought two one-way plane tickets to Baghdad. By the end of June he and his wife were on a plane from Orly, Halim forgetting in his haste to say good-bye to Donovan.

Donovan, however, was unconcerned. Mossad had gotten out of Halim what they needed. The focus now switched to Meshad. Since Meshad was an administrator under Khidhir Hamza in Atomic Energy, the Israelis were convinced he was an integral part of Iraq’s secret atomic bomb program as well. Mossad decided that if Meshad could not be recruited, other arrangements would have to be made—they might even have to show him a “better world,” the katsa euphemism for an assassination.

In June 1980, Meshad returned to Paris to check on equipment and ensure that the uranium France was obligated to ship to al-Tuwaitha was enriched 93 percent. After a week at Sarcelles and a detour to the French countryside, he returned to Room 9041 at his favorite hotel, the Meridien, at around seven o’clock in the evening on Friday, June 13. Late the next morning a housekeeper again passed the DO NOT DISTURB sign that had been hanging on the room’s doorknob throughout her entire morning shift. Anxious to clean the room and finish the floor, she slipped the key quietly into the lock and pushed the door open a crack, calling out, “Allo, Allo.” Stepping in, she spotted Meshad’s body lying on the floor beside the bed in a pool of blood, his throat slit.

The French papers in the following days reported that a hooker had propositioned Meshad in the elevator on his way to his room. Later on, the woman told inspectors she had heard men’s voices as she stood outside the door to Meshad’s room, though it was not clear if she had been asked by the Iraqi to come back later in the evening. The police concluded it was a professional job: someone—a business partner, a competitor, or even a foreign intelligence agent—wanted to get their hands on some papers in the Iraqi scientist’s room. This person, or group, had hired the prostitute to confront him outside his chamber and delay him. But Meshad had refused the proposition, then walked in on the perpetrators and been killed.

The truth, though, was very different. Meshad, in fact, had made a date with Marie-Claude Magalle that night. He had been seeing the prostitute on every visit to France since the night Halim had first introduced him to her months earlier. Mossad, who had tapped Meshad’s phone, knew that the Iraqi scientist had a date with the high-priced call girl later that night at the Meridien. According to Ostrovsky, before Magalle arrived, an Arabic-speaking katsa named Yehuda Gil had knocked on the door to Meshad’s room. The physicist cracked the door, leaving it chained. Gil quietly informed him that he had been sent from a “power” that would pay “a lot of money” for some information concerning the scientist’s work for Iraq’s Nuclear Research Center. Outraged, Meshad swore at Gil and told him to leave before he called hotel security. Gil, who was instructed only to make the offer, discreetly left the hotel.

Within minutes Marie-Claude arrived at Meshad’s room. Indeed, she may have overheard Gil and Meshad arguing at his doorway. But it did little to spoil the Iraqi scientist’s evening. The two had sex—Meshad, it turned out, had a weakness for S&M—and later that night Marie-Claude left Meshad sleeping peacefully in his hotel room bed. Shortly thereafter, a team of Israeli kidon, trained assassins, used a duplicated hotel passkey to silently slip into the scientist’s suite. Without fanfare, they slit Meshad’s throat and left him on the floor of his room, his life running out in a puddle beneath him. The prostitute, Magalle, was not in on the Mossad scheme. In fact, she did not even know that the mysterious men who called her were Israeli secret service. They were simply men who paid her generously to service customers they assigned her to and to provide information about the men afterward. She had her suspicions about who her mysterious employers might be, but what they asked for seemed harmless enough—mostly where her johns went, what they liked, whom they met or talked to, what they said about their jobs or personal lives, things like that. In her line of work it did not pay to ask questions.

But Marie-Claude was shocked when she heard about Meshad’s murder the next day from another professional. She was frightened. For one thing, she worried whether the authorities would try to blame her. And might the people who killed Meshad come after her next? Panicked, she called the Paris police. The investigating officers interviewed her. Magalle told the inspectors about the male voices she had overheard. Not sure what to make of her story, the police took her passport and restricted her to Paris as a material witness. Several weeks later the lead inspector contacted Magalle and instructed her to come to police headquarters on July 12 for a follow-up interview. Two days before her appointment, on the evening of July 10, Marie-Claude was working a busy corner on Boulevard St-Germain on the Rive Gauche. A black Mercedes pulled up across the street. The man inside beckoned to her. As she crossed the street, another black Mercedes jumped out from the curb and, racing down the boulevard, ran straight into the hooker, sending her careening off the hood. She was dead before she hit the asphalt. In a scenario reminiscent of the mysterious black car that had sideswiped the pretty young girl outside the shipping warehouse at La Seyne-sur-Mer months earlier, the Mercedes and the driver were never seen again. Witnesses could not even remember clearly in what direction the car had headed after striking Magalle. Meshad’s murder would go unsolved, if not unforgotten.