An 18-country network codenamed "Kilowatt" reportedly gave Israeli agents information on Palestinians, some of whom were assassinated in Europe.
The United States, the United Kingdom, France, West Germany and other Western countries gave Israel information that helped its Mossad intelligence agency track down and kill Palestinian terrorists in the 1970s, The Guardian reported on Wednesday, relying on what it said were newly declassified documents.
The information was shared through a network of intelligence agencies codenamed “Kilowatt,” according to the report. It did not indicate the source of the declassified documents, which according to the report were discovered in encrypted cables found in Swiss archives.
According to Aviva Guttmann, a historian of strategy and intelligence at Aberystwyth University who according to The Guardian discovered the documents, Italy and Switzerland were also part of the Kilowatt network, which included 18 countries.
Some of the information was used in the Mossad assassination campaign known as “Operation Wrath of God” following the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, where 11 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. Over the following years, at least 10 individuals linked by Israel to terrorism were assassinated in European cities.
“A lot was very granular, linking individuals to specific attacks and giving details that would be of great help,” The Guardian quoted Guttmann as saying. “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.”
One of the earliest targets was Wael Zwaiter, a Palestinian killed in Rome just weeks after Munich. Though supporters claimed he was innocent, Kilowatt cables indicated he was suspected of aiding the Black September Organization that carried out the Munich massacre, according to the report. Mahmoud al-Hamshari, a PLO representative in France, was also assassinated based on intelligence shared via Kilowatt, according to the report.
Mohamed Boudia, linked to multiple plots against Israeli targets, was killed in Paris with help from Swiss intelligence, Guttman’s research indicated. “I’m not sure the Israeli [assassination] campaign would have been possible without the tactical information from the European intelligence services,” she told The Guardian.
Her research also showed that Britain’s MI5 gave Mossad a picture of Ali Hassan Salameh, a key terrorist implicated in the Munich attack. In July 1973, the Mossad believed it had tracked Salameh to Lillehammer, a small Norwegian ski resort, and used the picture supplied by MI5 to identify its target. The man Mossad agents shot dead turned out to be another individual. Several of the Mossad operatives were detained by Norwegian authorities and the resultant outcry led then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir to wind up the Wrath of God campaign.
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