operation. In the days to come, she helped keep tabs on Ibor.
Manor himself flew in from Tel Aviv to supervise the surveillance and the capture. Inspired by the army’s uniformed senior officers, who prided themselves on being at the dangerous front lines with their troops, leaders of Israeli intelligence often would choose to be at the scene of a highly risky mission.
The capture went smoothly. An armed Israeli team surrounded Ibor and forced him to go to a safe house rented by the Mossad. French authorities noticed nothing.
The turncoat was interrogated and admitted that he had stolen a hundred documents from the air force—about electronic warfare plans and the layout of the Ramat David base in the north—and had offered to sell them to Egypt.
The orders were to return him home for trial, so the team injected Ibor with a tranquilizer to keep him quiet and stuffed him into a wooden box. An old plane belonging to the Israeli air force was waiting at a small airport near Paris.
The human box was loaded on board the plane. An anesthesiologist—Dr. Yonah Elian, a trusted volunteer from a hospital in Israel—administered another injection to keep the captive asleep.
That turned out to be an accidental overdose, fatal in the freezing winds that penetrated the fuselage. Ibor stopped breathing during the flight, and efforts to revive him failed. The captive now was dead. When the plane landed at Tel Aviv’s Sde Dov airfield, the Israeli snatch squad was terrified and did not know what to do.
Their calm and experienced commander, Eitan, had remained in Europe for another operation. As he recalled many years later, his underlings waited at the airport for over two hours until Harel surprised them with new instructions: dump the corpse into the Mediterranean.
A fresh flight crew and a new Shin Bet team arrived, and the rickety plane took off again. Ibor’s body was dropped to a watery grave from high above.
The original flyers and kidnappers went home, absolutely exhausted “after sleepless nights,” according to Eitan, who added: “Why was Isser’s order obeyed? Because if Isser told you to do something, you did it without asking questions.”
Israeli intelligence did not bother to tell the man’s wife anything. Her husband had run off with another woman, anyway.
In 2006, more than half a century after his father vanished, Tziper had a visit from two young intelligence operatives—one from Shin Bet and the other from the Mossad. They told him what seemed, more or less, to be the true story.
Elian, the young doctor who inadvertently killed Tziper’s father in 1954, was used by the Mossad and Shin Bet again in at least one foreign escapade: the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. There, too, the anesthesiologist administered sedatives by injection. On that South American adventure that would find its place in the lore of great intelligence operations, nothing went wrong. Rafi Eitan was also part of that kidnapping.
Elian would commit suicide in June 2011 by suffocating himself with a plastic bag. His clandestine, part-time career may not have played a role in that, but with his death at age 88 his secrets were exposed. Israeli news media discovered that the anesthesiologist moonlighted in Mossad missions and that his experiences had been disturbing to him.
“My father was haunted, all his life, by the tragedy,” his son Danny Elian, also a doctor, told Kol Israel radio—referring to the mishandled kidnapping of the spy in the Israeli military whose own name was Israel.
The death and dumping occurred barely six years after the State of Israel declared independence as the British ended their three decades of ruling Palestine. Yet, the fate of Ibor is still considered one of the lowest points in the annals of Israeli intelligence.
“We didn’t kill and we didn’t torture, and we didn’t do anything illegal to Israeli citizens, neither Jews nor Arabs,” Manor said many
Manor himself flew in from Tel Aviv to supervise the surveillance and the capture. Inspired by the army’s uniformed senior officers, who prided themselves on being at the dangerous front lines with their troops, leaders of Israeli intelligence often would choose to be at the scene of a highly risky mission.
The capture went smoothly. An armed Israeli team surrounded Ibor and forced him to go to a safe house rented by the Mossad. French authorities noticed nothing.
The turncoat was interrogated and admitted that he had stolen a hundred documents from the air force—about electronic warfare plans and the layout of the Ramat David base in the north—and had offered to sell them to Egypt.
The orders were to return him home for trial, so the team injected Ibor with a tranquilizer to keep him quiet and stuffed him into a wooden box. An old plane belonging to the Israeli air force was waiting at a small airport near Paris.
The human box was loaded on board the plane. An anesthesiologist—Dr. Yonah Elian, a trusted volunteer from a hospital in Israel—administered another injection to keep the captive asleep.
That turned out to be an accidental overdose, fatal in the freezing winds that penetrated the fuselage. Ibor stopped breathing during the flight, and efforts to revive him failed. The captive now was dead. When the plane landed at Tel Aviv’s Sde Dov airfield, the Israeli snatch squad was terrified and did not know what to do.
Their calm and experienced commander, Eitan, had remained in Europe for another operation. As he recalled many years later, his underlings waited at the airport for over two hours until Harel surprised them with new instructions: dump the corpse into the Mediterranean.
A fresh flight crew and a new Shin Bet team arrived, and the rickety plane took off again. Ibor’s body was dropped to a watery grave from high above.
The original flyers and kidnappers went home, absolutely exhausted “after sleepless nights,” according to Eitan, who added: “Why was Isser’s order obeyed? Because if Isser told you to do something, you did it without asking questions.”
Israeli intelligence did not bother to tell the man’s wife anything. Her husband had run off with another woman, anyway.
In 2006, more than half a century after his father vanished, Tziper had a visit from two young intelligence operatives—one from Shin Bet and the other from the Mossad. They told him what seemed, more or less, to be the true story.
Elian, the young doctor who inadvertently killed Tziper’s father in 1954, was used by the Mossad and Shin Bet again in at least one foreign escapade: the capture of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. There, too, the anesthesiologist administered sedatives by injection. On that South American adventure that would find its place in the lore of great intelligence operations, nothing went wrong. Rafi Eitan was also part of that kidnapping.
Elian would commit suicide in June 2011 by suffocating himself with a plastic bag. His clandestine, part-time career may not have played a role in that, but with his death at age 88 his secrets were exposed. Israeli news media discovered that the anesthesiologist moonlighted in Mossad missions and that his experiences had been disturbing to him.
“My father was haunted, all his life, by the tragedy,” his son Danny Elian, also a doctor, told Kol Israel radio—referring to the mishandled kidnapping of the spy in the Israeli military whose own name was Israel.
The death and dumping occurred barely six years after the State of Israel declared independence as the British ended their three decades of ruling Palestine. Yet, the fate of Ibor is still considered one of the lowest points in the annals of Israeli intelligence.
“We didn’t kill and we didn’t torture, and we didn’t do anything illegal to Israeli citizens, neither Jews nor Arabs,” Manor said many
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