The Good Spy by Kai Bird

Author:Kai Bird [Bird, Kai]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88977-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

January 22, 1979, was a cold and gray day in Beirut. It was the birthday of Salameh’s young niece, and Ali Hassan had promised he would stop by his mother’s apartment in the late afternoon for the birthday party. He then intended to drive on to Damascus, where Arafat was expecting him to attend a meeting of the Palestinian National Council. That afternoon at 3:25 P.M. Salameh kissed Georgina good-bye—she was five months pregnant. He then got into the backseat of the tan Chevrolet station wagon. At the last moment, one of his aides, a young man named Jamal, came running up with a written message. It was yet another warning from Bashir Gemayel’s Phalange, saying the hit would happen in the next day or two. One of Salameh’s guards got out of the station wagon, and Jamal took his place. His driver headed out toward Rue Verdun with the Land Rover jeep following. Just a kilometer away, the convoy turned right from Rue Verdun onto Beka Street and glided past Erika Chambers’s eighth-floor balcony. Just then a woman driving behind the Land Rover suddenly sped up and, passing the backup car, cut in behind Salameh’s Chevy station wagon. As the Chevy came abreast of the parked Volkswagen, Chambers held her breath and pushed a remote-control switch. The Volkswagen exploded, enveloping the Chevy in a huge ball of fire. It too exploded, and so too did the car driven by the woman, a thirty-four-year-old British secretary named Susan Wareham. She died along with Salameh and his bodyguards.

“It was like hell,” an eyewitness told Peter Taylor. “There was a flash, then a big bang.… So many dead people, burnt cars and young bodies littering the street. Then I saw Abu Hassan Salameh getting out of a car and falling on the ground. The people told me who he was.” By sheer coincidence, Abu Daoud, the mastermind of the Munich Olympics attack, happened to be in the neighborhood and rushed down the street to see the wounded Salameh lying in the street. “His face was badly cut,” Abu Daoud said.

Still alive, Salameh was taken in an ambulance by the Red Crescent (the local equivalent of the Red Cross) to the hospital of the American University of Beirut, just five hundred yards away, where surgeons tried to extract a metal splinter lodged in his brain. He died on the operating table at 4:03 P.M.

In the midst of the carnage, Erika Chambers calmly walked out of her apartment building, climbed into a rented Datsun, and drove away toward the beaches of East Beirut. Late that evening, she rendezvoused with two Mossad officers in a rubber raft who motored her out to an Israeli naval ship.*2

Eight other people were killed by Chambers’s car bomb: Salameh’s two bodyguards and driver, the British secretary Susan Wareham, a German nun who happened to be walking on the sidewalk, and three Lebanese civilians. Sixteen people were wounded.

Frank Anderson was preparing for a meeting with Salameh when he heard the explosion.

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