Rome; April 1972
Omar Mumtazz was arrested on April 7 at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. A plainclothes customs official noticed him nervously chain-smoking while waiting for his baggage on a flight arriving from Beirut.
When the nervous-looking Arab grabbed his luggage and headed toward the green “Nothing to Declare” exit, the customs officer stopped him and pointed him toward one of the uniformed officers in the red line. Omar Mumtazz still might have made it if he had kept cool. But when the Italian customs official asked to see his passport, Mumtazz slipped a hundred-dollar bill inside the document. This is a Mediterranean country, he told himself. This is how we do business in the Mediterranean.
The customs official opened the passport and watched the green bill float gently to the floor. He gave a thin smile and called to his captain. A few moments later Mumtazz was taken by three armed men to a cramped office, where he watched with mounting apprehension as a customs official cut through the false bottom of his suitcase. Out of the opening tumbled four fat packets of heroin.
Mumtazz made a terrible row. Though he had only an ordinary Libyan passport, he claimed that he was an intelligence officer who had done work for the Italians. He had powerful friends! He demanded to see someone-immediately!-from the Servizio Informazione Difesa.
The Carabinieri thought he was just another two-bit Arab hoodlum in a fancy suit. But he made such a racket, even after he was punched several times in the stomach, that a Carabinieri officer finally placed a telephone call. An hour later a bedraggled major from the SID arrived and the Libyan began to lay out his story.
“I know something that is very important,” he said. The major dully nodded his head.
“I know someone who is planning the worst crimes! The very worst! A Palestinian!”
“Dica. Dica,” said the bored major.
“I will tell the information to a senior officer. To him only!”
One of the Caribinieri kicked the Libyan in the shins. He screamed and looked around the room desperately.
“The president!” he shouted. “They are planning to kill the President of the United States.”
The SID major took Mumtazz to a basement cell at the Ministry of Defense on Via Venti Settembre. There, the Libyan told his story to a captain who listened intently and took careful notes.
The Libyan claimed he had information about a new Palestinian terrorist organization that was planning a string of spectacular operations culminating in the assassination of the American president. He said he had met the group’s chief of operations-a man who called himself Nabil-in Rome a few months earlier. He had provided Nabil with women, introducing him to several German girls he knew in Rome, and later with guns and explosives. As he narrated the tale, Mumtazz watched the Italian captain to gauge his interest and see if he was taking notes.
Mumtazz gave a brief physical description of Nabil. He was tall and strikingly handsome, with thick black hair and a clean-shaven face. He spoke several languages, including English and some Italian. He was aloof, secretive about his work, and highly intelligent. He liked to drink and smoke and seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for European women.
When Mumtazz got to the Palestinian’s sex habits, he noticed that the Italian officer was looking at him dubiously.
“Every word is true!” protested the Libyan. “If you don’t believe me, ask one of your own men in the Italian Embassy in Tripoli. Giuseppe Rosso! He knows me! He will vouch for me!”
The captain wrote down the name. But as he did so, he arched his eyebrows high on his forehead.
“I have tapes!” said the Libyan, leaning forward as if sharing a great secret.
“Tapes?” asked the Italian captain.
“Yes!” said the Libyan triumphantly. “Tapes! Of Nabil talking to me on the telephone about his plans. In code!”
The SID man put aside his notebook and picked up the telephone to call a colonel.
“Immunity! I give you nothing without immunity!” shouted the Libyan as the captain dialed the number.
“No immunity, no tapes!”
Mumtazz told his story again, for the third time that day, to the SID colonel. The more senior his interrogator, the more details he provided. The colonel listened and then telephoned another colonel in a different department of the intelligence service. There were consultations. Mumtazz was asked to remain overnight and provided with hot food and a soft bed.
The next morning, when files had been checked and cables received from the Italian Embassy in Tripoli, the SID men met again for further consultations. Yes, said one of the colonels, the service did in fact have a tenuous relationship with a Libyan named Omar Mumtazz. He was from one of the wealthy old Libyan families that had collaborated with the Italians during the colonial period and prospered later under King Idriss. According to the SID man in Tripoli, Omar Mumtazz was a young dilettante, half-ideologue, half-pimp. He travelled in unusual Arab circles-the criminal underworld and the radical political fringe-and had provided occasional tidbits of information about Libyans, Syrians, Palestinians.
The Italian officials agreed that Mumtazz should be asked to confirm his story. If he could indeed furnish tape recordings of Nabil, then the SID would recommend to the Italian Ministry of Interior that the drug-smuggling charges against him be dropped.
The offer was conveyed orally to the Libyan. Feeling cocky, Omar Mumtazz asked for it in writing. Whereupon one of the SID colonels slapped him twice on the face and walked out of the room.
Mumtazz dropped his request. The tapes were in a safe deposit box at a branch of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, he said. He was taken there by two soldiers dressed in plainclothes. To their surprise, the Libyan emerged from the bank vault after several minutes smiling and clutching a reel of tape. The colonels back at headquarters were even more surprised when they played the tape and heard on it the voice of an Arab man, talking in English in what sounded like a private code. He said he needed four suits and ten pairs of shoes and would pick them up at eight o’clock.
Mumtazz explained that in the code he had worked out with Nabil, the message meant that the Palestinian wanted four pistols with silencers and 100 kilos of plastic explosive, and would pick up the shipment at four the following day.
There were several other items on the tape. One was a conversation between Mumtazz and the Arab man about arrangements for a party; the other sounded like a man and woman making love. The panting and moaning went on for more than twenty minutes, and when the woman began praising the man’s sexual prowess in fluent Italian, one of the colonels turned off the tape.
Eventually they referred the case to General Armani. It seemed to be a potentially delicate matter. Something the Americans should know. Or perhaps, something the Americans shouldn’t know. The colonels weren’t sure. The general would know. He was everything an Italian general should be: tall and trim, silver-gray hair, suave and cunning. Even when he made mistakes, they seemed to younger colleagues to be the right mistakes. The general listened to the tape and then talked to Mumtazz.
“What evidence do you have about the plot to kill the American president?” demanded General Armani. “That is the most important thing you have told us, but there is nothing on the tape about assassination. I think you must be a liar.”
“Of course there is nothing on the tape!” said the Libyan. “Would the Palestinian be so stupid as to talk about such a matter on the telephone?”
They had discussed the plan to kill the president during a meeting in a cafe in Rome, Mumtazz explained. At the meeting, Nabil had asked him to obtain a sharpshooter’s rifle for the job. The plan was to shoot the American president during one of his foreign trips. The Palestinian didn’t say when or where.
General Armani nodded wearily, with a look that said: I believe nothing. In fact, he was unsure about the assassination plot. It was plausible. But then, it was also implausible. The general was certain of only one thing: he had something that would be of profound interest to the American Embassy. The Americans were obsessed about assassination plots. The one sure way to get their attention was to provide intelligence reports that someone was planning to take a potshot at the president. General Armani smiled.
“Basta!” said the general to Mumtazz. Enough.
“Excellency, please,” whined the Libyan. But the general was gone and the guards were taking Omar Mumtazz back to his cell.
General Armani made two copies of the tape. He took one with him to the American Embassy on the Via Veneto. He gave it to the American military attache along with transcripts of the interviews with Mumtazz that detailed the assassination plot. The attache said he was profoundly grateful to General Armani for his help and was certain that his fine work would be appreciated in the highest
councils of NATO.
Spare me, thought the general.
The military attache was the senior representative in Italy of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He sent a flash cable to the DIA operations center and forwarded the tape itself by overnight pouch. His cable included the stunning allegation-“a Palestinian plot to assassinate the president”-that started bells ringing and lights flashing all over Washington. There was much commotion within the national security bureaucracy, rousing the Secret Service, the FBI, the NSC-and, not least, the DIA’s crosstown rival, the Central Intelligence Agency.
General Armani put the second copy of the tape in his briefcase. He called his wife Anna and told her that he would be home late for dinner. When he left the office, he walked briskly down the Via Venti Settembre to Via Delle Quatro Fontane, where he ducked into a cafe and made a quick telephone call.
The general reached his Israeli contact at home. They met an hour later in a quiet cafe off the Via del Corso.
“We ran across something of interest this week,” said the general.
“And what is that, my friend?” said the Israeli. He was smiling and squinting at the general.
“We grabbed a cheap Arab smuggler at the airport. To save himself, the man told us an interesting tale. It involves a Palestinian who seems to be acquiring a small arsenal here in Europe.”
“Who told you these things?” asked the Israeli as if he had not quite heard the name.
“I cannot tell you who. It doesn’t matter, anyway. He is just a cheap hoodlum. I have something better for you.”
“And what is that, my friend?” asked the Israeli, still smiling and squinting.
“The Palestinian. On tape,” said General Armani. He nodded to the newspaper he had placed on the table when he entered the cafe. Inside it was a cassette tape of the Palestinian.
The Israeli nodded. Otherwise, his expression didn’t change. Still the squint. It was the very ordinariness of Israeli intelligence officers that made them trustworthy, the Italian general had concluded long ago. Their bad teeth, bald heads, squinting eyes, poor posture. They were too ordinary to play the self-deceiving games that led most intelligence services to disaster.
General Armani explained the meaning of the code used by the Palestinian. The suits and shoes, and how they really referred to pistols and plastic explosive. The only thing he left out, other than Mumtazz’s name, was the plot to kill the American president. Let the Italians get sole credit for that one.
General Armani left the tape in the folded newspaper when he got up from the table. The Israeli sent the cassette that night to Tel Aviv, where it was added to a growing Mossad file on the activities of Fatah’s intelligence service.