Paris, France, June 8, 1992, midnight.
The street is too quiet for a Monday.
A dark Toyota stops in front of the Hotel Meridian, in heart of Mon Parnas.
From the bank rear, the TFBo tilts towards the forward, laughing at something that Lebanese bodyguard just said.
He is 44 years old and has a secret that you know.
Less than a minute left until your death.
In the hotel lobby, a man in leather jacket watches through the revolving door.
Don’t move, don’t deviate the look.
30 m away, in a parallel dark, a white pejugô is parked with the engine off.
Two men in the front seat, silent.
On the other side of the city, 4 km from distance, Shabtai Shavit, director of Mossad, is standing in front of a radio transmitter.
He doesn’t sleep at 6pm.
The operation that you currently coordinate had been canceled 4 years earlier, but Xavit reactivated it alone against orders superiors.
The question no one asked yet because Bisseiso is not a target any.
He is the officer of P.
Man’s most valuable intelligence who built bridges with the CIA, with the Germans, with the French.
He knows secrets that entire governments want hide.
For years, Pisseis operated on him in the shadows, doing the work that Yasser Arafat could not do publicly.
He was the civilized face of the Palestinian resistance, formed in international law, fluent in five languages, with contacts in all European capitals.
The CIA called him the diplomat.
The French considered him a gateway to negotiations serious.
For the Germans, he was the only Palestinian whom they could trust later of the Munich disaster.
And it was exactly this trust that Israel wanted destroy.
Three days ago, he left Tunis driving a new Jeep Renegade imported from the United States.
He bought in Berlin and now plans take you home by ferry.
Want surprise his wife Dima [music] and the three children.
It’s a gift, a symbol of normality in a life that was never normal.
Beiso grew up in the countryside Kanunis refugees in Gaza.
See Israelis kill his uncle during the 1967 occupation.
He swore revenge, but chose intelligence instead of weapons.
became the man who knew everything, but never was on the front line.
The man who built bridges, while others planes exploded.
And now, in 1992, with the Cold War over and the East Midfielder in transformation, Bisseo was more valuable than ever.
He had scheduled meetings with the CIA, conversations planned with Quidor, the Ministry of French Foreign Affairs.
There were even rumors that he was helping to prepare a secret trading channel between the PLO and Israel, but someone decided that he couldn’t get there.
Since crossed the German border, Bisseiso is being followed.
A team in Berlin passed the baton to another in Paris.
Are Division-trained veteran agents of Mossad special operations, known as Chaesarea.
They know where he goes before he decides.
They know what he eats, who he talks to, How often do you check the rear view mirror? A surveillance is so tight that They managed to confirm where he would have dinner.
A restaurant from the Hipótámos chain, near the Montparnas tower, 3 hours before him to make the reservation.
As? Why Someone within the PLO had already given the full script, a Palestinian named Adnan Yassim.
He worked at PLO office in Paris, a mid-level employee than anyone paid a lot of attention.
And so there was access to calendars, trips, contacts.
And there was a problem.
The wife his, Naddia, was dying.
Cancer of advanced stage ovary.
The treatment experimental trial available in Paris cost a fortune he would never have.
and so sought help within the PLO.
It was ignored.
He looked for Arab donors.
Nothing.
I was desperate when a man approached him in a café in Montmre.
He said he was an Iranian diplomat.
Said that Iran had an assistance program medical for movement employees of resistance.
[music] Lie.
It was the Mossad.
They had been watching him for months waiting for the right moment.
And when Naddia became ill, they found out they had the perfect lever.
And so he didn’t betray by ideology.
cheated because he loved her wife and saw no other way out.
The mood paid for all the treatment.
In return, he delivered every bisseiso move, every hotel, every contact, every dinner.
And so I didn’t know I was signing the death sentence for a man.
I thought who was just providing information for surveillance.
When Bisseo was killed and so he collapsed, tried to kill three months later, survived.
Naddia died in January 1993 and thus disappeared from the records public soon after.
Some say that the Mossad relocated him to avoid retaliation, others say that P herself executed him when he discovered the betrayal.
No one knows for sure, but the information that he provided was what made the operation possible.
And now Bisseiso Get out of the car without knowing it was sold by the people themselves.
He says goodbye to Lebanese friends.
The woman who had dinner with them is smiling.
The bodyguard will get out of the back seat, but he needs to Bisseiso pulls the front seat to forward.
It’s that second.
Bisseiso bent down, hand on the backrest, that two men approach.
They have cuts skinhead hair.
Walk slowly, hands in pockets.
One of them is known in internal Mossad files as Tom.
He carries a 22 caliber beret with muffler and a cloth bag attached to the barrel to capture the cartridges.
No may leave traces.
The other is Frank.
He’s not armed.
Its function is hold B6 against the car hood.
Tom raise your arm.
The distance is less of half m.
Three shots all in head.
B6 still falls next to the car holding the front seat.
The sound is muffled.
It sounds like the crack of a lighter.
Lebanese woman screams later too much.
Tom and Frank are already walking, not running towards the parallel street.
The bodyguard pulls out his gun, but one third Israeli agent, codome Avi, appears behind him with a beret pointed to the back of your neck.
The Lebanese stops.
Avi retreats slowly, gun still raised until disappear into an alley.
In 2 hours, all the Mossad team will be out of the France.
Five agents, three flights different.
No trace other than a body on the asphalt and a stain of blood that the rain will wash away before the dawn.
But what Israel did not expect was the reaction.
The CIA is furious.
Bisseiso was the most important contact that they had within the PLO.
The man who was helping to map cells terrorists in the Middle East.
He was going to meet with American agents on the day following the murder.
Had information about the financial structure of Islamic JiAD, about cells dormant in Lebanon, about plans to attacks that only he knew about.
All of this died with him on the sidewalk of Paris.
James Wolsey, [song] that would become CIA director a year later, classified Bisseiso’s death as a strategic error of proportions gigantic.
Robert Baer, agent CIA veteran, who worked directly with Besseo, it was more direct.
They killed our best asset out of revenge.
It was stupidity, not strategy.
France declares public outrage.
It’s the sixth or seventh, depending on the source, leader Palestinian murdered on French soil since the 70s.
Mahmud Hamschari, killed by telephone bomb in 1972.
Basio Alkubis, shot in 1973.
Now Biso.
The French government calls for the Israeli ambassador.
The police French launches an operation national scale called Operation Ombre, which is the largest investigation against foreign intelligence activities on French territory since the Second World War.
They interrogate 47 people in two weeks.
track telephone calls, movements banking, hotel reservations.
Find out that Mossad agents used false passports of at least four different countries: Canada, Belgium, Denmark and Germany.
One of the agents identified only as Avica in police reports left impressions fingerprints on a hotel handrail.
But when the French try to track the name on the passport, they discover that the identity does not exist.
It’s a ghost.
They all are.
The French police can identify the White Peugeot used in the escape.
It was rented from an agency near Charles de Gole airport, three days before the murder.
The man who rented presented driver’s license Canadian [music] and credit card Belgian.
Paid in cash.
The employee the rental company remembers him because he He had a strange accent.
It didn’t seem Canadian, looked Mediterranean, maybe Greek.
The car was found abandoned near Garre de Lon, the train station train.
With the tank empty and the interior clean with chemicals.
None fingerprint, no hair, no forensic traces, work professional.
The investigation reaches a dead end.
In less than a month, the France begins to dismantle the Mossad infrastructure in the country.
Interrogations, expulsions.
Six Israeli diplomats are declared persona non grata and sent back to Telviv.
Three businessmen Israelis who had been operating in Paris for years are being investigated for fraud passports and expelled.
The Mossad loses contacts, support points, houses safe.
It takes almost 5 years to rebuild the operation in France.
And why what? For a man who maybe shouldn’t have be on the hit list.
The first Israeli minister Itzag Shamir denies everything.
His spokesperson calls the accusations completely and utterly ridiculous.
Shamir, himself a former agent of the Mossad, which participated in assassinations in the 40s, know the game, deny everything, always, even when everyone knows true.
But in the corridors of Western intelligence no one believes.
The CIA shares information with French.
British MI6 does the same.
Everyone knows it was the Mossade, but there is no way to prove it in court.
And Israel know this, that the real reason for kill Bisseo.
Here the story divides.
Officially, Israel claims that Bisseo was involved in the Munich massacre in 1972, when black september terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes.
Shabita Shavit, the director of Mossad, was convinced of this, but there was a problem.
Bisseiso was 24 years old in 1972.
He was practically a boy.
Some Mossad agents themselves doubted it.
One head of session in Brussels was shocked when I found out about his death.
Biss been removed from target list in 1988.
With approval from then director Nahum Admoni, [music] Xavit put him on comes back on its own.
The second theory: Israel wanted to cut ties with PLO with the West.
Bisseiso was not alone an intelligence officer.
He was the bridge to the diplomatic legitimization of Yasser Arafat.
Killing him was a message.
The PLO will not have space at the table negotiations while Israel can prevent.
Robert Bear, CIA agent, who worked with Biso, he said this openly years later.
It wasn’t revenge was strategy.
20 more years Late in 2014, a wreath was placed on Biso’s tomb, in the cemetery of the martyrs of Palestine, in Hamam Alchat, Tunisia.
[music] A leader British Labor, Jeremy Corbin, was photographed participating in the tribute.
The Israeli press accused Corbin to honor terrorists.
Netan repeated that Bisseo was linked to Munich, but there was never any proof, only allegations.
The truth about Besseo and Munich remains foggy to this day.
Documents declassified from services German intelligence in the 2000s do not mention BCO among those involved.
A CIA, in later reports, stated that Bisizou was not operationally active in 1972.
He was too young, without experience, no command position.
So why Did Israel insist so much on this connection? Because Munich is the founding trauma of Modern Mossade.
It is the failure that cannot be forgotten, the massacre that justified decades of revenge operations against around the world.
The working wrath of God, launched after Munich, eliminated dozens of Palestinian targets.
Some culprits, some innocents, like Ahmed Bushik, Moroccan waiter killed by mistake in Norway in 1973.
But for the Mossad, Munich was sacred and anyone who could be vaguely linked to the massacre was scheduled for always.
Pseiso had connections with members of Black September, the group responsible for Munich.
That was enough for Shabita Xavit.
It didn’t matter if he was there or not.
It mattered that he I knew who was there.
And that, in logic of the Mossad, made him guilty.
In 2015, a French court rejected the case against Israel for lack of evidence.
A Bisseis’ widow appealed to him, he lost new.
A Palestinian lawyer summarized the decision.
It is the simple admission that a Political murder can go unpunished.
[music] And it can, because operations like This does not follow the laws that appear in books.
They follow another logic: elimination, impact, disappearance.
Dima Beseo, the widow, spent years trying to get justice.
She created the three children alone in Tunis, maintaining her house that her husband never came back to see.
The Jeep Renegade was parked in the garage for 5 years before she managed sell it.
I couldn’t look at him.
In 2018, in a rare interview with a channel of Arabic television, Dima said: “My husband was not a terrorist, he was a man who believed in negotiation and was killed for that.
She died in 2021, without ever having seen those responsible processed.
Shabtai Shavit died in 2023, aged 84, on vacation in Italy.
He has never spoken publicly about Bisseiso, but former Mossad agents confirmed years later that the operation it was his and that he executed it knowing which would generate a diplomatic crisis.
He doesn’t cared.
There was something more important in play.
In the internal culture of the Mossad, Xavit is seen ambiguously.
Some the consider a hero, the man who does not He hesitated to do what was necessary.
Others see him as reckless, the director who placed revenge above strategy and almost destroyed relations with allies for a questionable operation.
But everyone agree on one thing: he was faithful to mission above all.
And the mission in 1992 was sending a message.
The PLO would not have space at the negotiating table while Israel could stop it.
The Mossad does not kills to avenge.
kills to change the game.
And on that June night in Paris, in front of a hotel on the left bank, with a man lying next to a jeep that never reached Tunis, the game changed.
Bissuo was going to build bridges, he died before to finish the first one.
And the bridges that he left unfinished never were rebuilt in the same way.
This is the part that no one counts.
It’s not the shot that changes history, is the emptiness that it leave it.
And in 1992, on that silent street, the emptiness was so deep sound that echoed for years in living rooms intelligence from three continents.
A operation was a success, but the cost real would only be calculated much later, when it became clear that killing bisseiso did not impede peace negotiations, just delayed the inevitable and poisoned trust between allies.
The last irony.
B6 was killed to prevent the PLO gained recognition international.
A year later, in 1993, Israel would sign the Oslo Accords with the PLO itself.
Bisso.
I was right, just didn’t live to see it.
