This is an interview with an assassin. At least I think it is. Though it’s just possible that Juval Aviv is a brilliant conman who has persuaded some of the world’s most powerful corporations, media organisations and governments to trust him.
Put it this way: his life is either stranger than fiction or it is fiction. Its details are hinted at rather than spelled out in the blurb for his first novel, a thriller entitled Max. After serving in the Israel Defence Forces, the blurb states, Aviv “participated” in special operations for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. One such mission inspired the Steven Spielberg movie Munich. If you have seen it, you can only conclude that Aviv is the basis for Eric Bana’s character Avner, the leader of the team that killed several of the terrorists responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
So is he Avner? “I can’t tell you that,” he says in a soft, barely foreign accent. His first language is Hebrew. “I can’t talk about it.” Was he, at least, the source for George Jonas’s book Vengeance, from which Spielberg’s film was adapted? “Let me just tell you one thing. There is no statute of limitation to the events in the book Vengeance and in the movie. It has become a popular thing lately for families of those who were killed to sue Israeli officials and ex-Mossad agents. Because of legal restrictions one should not take responsibility for things. It’s not smart. Off the record.”
But I’d prefer to stay on the record. “On the record, I can only say that I’m familiar with those events.” A little later, he is still talking about Operation Wrath of God, the assassination mission. Its eye-for-an-eye justice, he concedes, proved to be no deterrent to future terrorists. “But when you’re on a mission you don’t think that way. You have a list. You go out and do a job. It’s a military operation.”
The last assassin I interviewed (note how I just throw it in) was James Earl Ray, convicted of the murder of Martin Luther King. As it happens, I am not sure he was a killer either, but in his prison uniform and with his big-brush haircut he at least looked the part. Aviv, meanwhile, is 59, bald and sleek. He strides from his room in a Westminster hotel dressed in an expensive blue suit and smelling of cologne. Is this what a trained killer looks and smells like? Why not?
The alternative version of his life, available on certain websites, is that he never worked for the Israeli secret service. The then head of Mossad says that he has never heard of him (he would say that, of course). Aviv’s only experience of security issues, so this theory goes, was as a security guard for the Israeli airline El Al. After a short spell in the military, he emigrated to America and found work as a cab driver. “No, that’s a mixture of misinformation,” Aviv says. “I drove cabs in New York after the mission was over and I was stuck in America. I ended the Munich mission. I didn’t want to do it any more.”
The Israeli Government wanted to keep him under its control but he craved independence, he insists. When he quit, he was banned, for a while, from re-entering Israel. He says that although he will never lose his feelings for Israel, he is now a patriotic US citizen whose true loyalty is to himself.
He may or may not have been an able assassin but he is one of the worst secret-keepers ever, and I say that even allowing for the fact that he needed to provide his would-be clients with a CV that would give credibility to Interfor Inc, the private intelligence firm he set up in New York in 1979. I am only surprised by his claim that he managed to keep his family in the dark for so long. He married his wife Tsila when he was 23 and she was 20, but because of his “mission” barely saw her for the first few years of their marriage and missed the first three years of his daughter’s life, by which time the family had moved to New York. He also has a son, who now works for Interfor, yet he says that the family found out the truth about his past only when Munich came out last year.
What did his children say? “There wasn’t much they could say. My son was proud of his father as a son would be, but both (of my children) were concerned about safety.” His daughter? Was she proud? “They were both proud and they both understood because they’re pro- Israel and they accept that it was a military mission.
“But it became harder safety-wise: we moved several times. We took precautions, but I believe in fate: if there is a will there’s a way for terrorists to do what they do.” Why hasn’t he been killed? “I think too many events have happened since then in the world. I’m a nobody now. I’m not important.”
Or maybe he is counting on no one believing a word he says. His latest incredible, if disguised, confession is contained in the pages of Max, the first of a trio of thrillers he has signed up to write. Here the Aviv character goes by the name of Sam Woolfman. Like Aviv (and Avner), Woolfman becomes disillusioned with Mossad and bitter about Israel’s reluctance to honour his efforts. Like Aviv, he earns an honest crust by investigating the death of Robert Maxwell, although the corpulent newspaper magnate is here renamed Max Robertson. In real life, Aviv explains, he was employed by the Mirror Pension Fund to investigate where its money had disappeared to. “I didn’t know what I was looking into. I was following the money, looking at a businessman who lost his empire, only to find out that — wow — there was a different Robert Maxwell from the one we knew.” According to Aviv, Maxwell was a spy as well as a businessman, who worked simultaneously for Mossad, the KGB and MI6.
They must have been mad to employ such a nut, I say, but Aviv explains that, in the “world of the clandestine”, nuts are exactly the people you have to deal with.
Without spoiling the book, I can reveal that Max Robertson’s death is no suicide. In that semi-off-the-record way of his, Aviv claims that his theory of a murder ordered at the highest levels is true.
“I wish I could write that book as nonfiction, but I don’t think I would survive it.”
He’d be bumped off? “There would be an attempt to dismiss the book or make sure it doesn’t come out, and the best thing would be to destroy the messenger. I know that because I’ve been around other investigations.
“The next book is going to be about Pan Am Flight 103 and Lockerbie. I was a chief investigator on that and when I pointed the finger at the CIA and said, ‘You guys did it’, I knew that my life would never be the same.”
Aviv had been appointed by Pan Am. The airline had gone bust by the time he reported but his conclusions have become the alternative testament of the 1988 bombing. It wasn’t the Libyans; it was the Iranians, retaliating for the accidental shooting down of one of their jets by America, he says.
The CIA let the bomb through customs because it didn’t want to jeopardise a heroin-smuggling operation it was running with a group connected to Hezbollah which, in turn, would help to free hostages in Beirut.
The odd thing is that although Aviv’s report was leaked and he testified in front of Congress, his life was not ruined. Rather, he has prospered.
Even stranger, he is today sporting a CIA badge on his lapel. “I’m a consultant for them now,” he says. Pragmatic of him. “Yeah, very pragmatic. You make peace with your enemies and life goes on.
“The FBI harassed me for almost six years and went after me to change the report. They did things one can’t even believe of a government agency.”
Like what? “Oh, they went to all my clients and said, ‘Don’t do business with him’, so economically I suffered. They challenged me in court. Yet now, if you look at my brochures . . .” He got an FBI certificate of merit last year.
“Three or four years before I was considered a liar, a fabricator, a bad guy. Now they need me because I’m the expert on terrorism.”
I ask if he has taken his own advice and carried out the DIY security checks on his hotel room recommended in his 2003 book, The Complete Terrorism Survival Guide, which advises people to “check every place a terrorist might be lurking in wait. Look in the bathroom, closets, behind drapes and under the bed. Only then dismiss the bellhop (with a tip).”
He assures me it is second nature for him. I have a sudden image of Inspector Clouseau entering a room and being karate-chopped by Cato. I tell him I stopped reading the book because it was too depressing, which is sort of true.
When it is not giggle-making, Aviv’s expertise tends towards common sense: invading Iraq has made the West less safe; identity cards are a sacrifice worth making for greater security; banning racial profiling is plain dotty. But detaining suspects without trial for 90 days would make Britain as uncivilised as Soviet Russia, and Guantanamo Bay, he says, is “outrageous”.
As for what the Average Joe can do to stay alive, he suggests that we avoid commuting in the rush hour. Something very nasty is about to happen.
“I listen to what people tell me on the street. I have sources all over. I’m telling you — I haven’t said it yet to anyone — there’s going to be something big in the next two or three months, either here or in America. Another 9/11 type. I don’t know where. I don’t know how. But it’s coming.” Later he becomes more oracular. “It will be in five or six cities simultaneously: mass transportation again — trains, buses — and where people gather in a close environment.”
God, I hope that he’s wrong! “Oh, I definitely hope that I’m wrong. So far, unfortunately, I haven’t been.” He says that a week before last July’s attack on the London Underground he had predicted it. “I don’t know where it came from, but I said, ‘Within a week there’s going to be a major bombing in England, and if it’s London it’s going to be in a subway’. And a week later it happened. The next morning I had three FBI agents in my office. They wanted to know where I got the information.”
But was it just a hunch? “If I had the information I would have come forward, of course.” Spielberg, who used him as a consultant on Munich, clearly trusts Aviv, as did the Mirror pensioners and Pan Am. According to his firm’s brochures, any number of corporations, law firms and American news outfits still do. I’d certainly like to trust him, for he is pleasantly urbane company, but I can’t help noticing how often he contradicts himself.
At one point he says that the CIA panicked itself into covering up the truth of Lockerbie; at another he claims that the truth would have brought down a president. In one breath he calls America incompetent for not capturing bin Laden; in another he says that it needs him alive as a hate figure. And if Aviv did accurately predict the London bombing, then he was wrong the next day on Fox News to forecast an attack on the US within “90 days at most”.
I say if he predicted it, because Aviv’s own record of media appearances does not list him giving any television interview during the month before July 7 and his only recorded lectures were three weeks before in Canada on white-collar crime and financial sector security.
I look him in the eye and ask if, one day, I am going to be embarrassed to discover that he is nothing more than New York cab driver with a gift for fantasy. “Absolutely not,” he says, his brown eyes holding mine. I have never known someone capable of maintaining such good eye contact for so long. It is a trick that I have always been suspicious of. Like his intriguingly well written novel, Juval Aviv’s life has, I bet, lost nothing in the telling.
Max was published by Century on July 6 (£11.99)
