On 21 July 1973, in a small, quiet Norwegian vacation town called Lillehammer, Mossad committed two unforgivable mistakes: first, it killed the wrong man and, second, it got caught doing it. On the official diplomatic level, the Lillehammer affair and public trial of the six Mossad officers caused a mass outpouring of international outrage and hostile press towards Israel. On the secret intelligence level, as this chapter demonstrates, it was as if the Lillehammer affair never happened. Chapter 8 focuses on three cases where cooperation started before the killing in Lillehammer and lasted for several months after. The chapter also discusses Club de Berne reports from early 1973 about terrorist activities in Scandinavia, which explains why Mossad readily believed claims that Salameh, a top terrorist, would be in Norway.

The concluding chapter discusses how Mossad relied heavily on foreign intelligence agencies to organise its covert actions. This invites the reader to rethink the oft-presented image of Mossad as a near omnipotent and omniscient agency. Instead, it is clear that Mossad did not act alone, and that European intelligence was vital for the successful implementation of Operation Wrath of God. The book thus offers a more nuanced and realistic view of Mossad’s strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion also discusses the major themes of the book, including questions relating to the international relations of intelligence agencies and the effectiveness of covert actions. Lastly, it discusses the core dilemma that European intelligence agencies faced when Operation Wrath of God was exposed: should they criticise Mossad and risk losing it as a vital partner in the fight against terrorism, or keep quiet and continue cooperating with Israeli security? Obviously, they chose the latter because the intelligence exchanges were deemed very valuable and because it could be kept entirely secret – at least until this book, which has revealed the secret for the first time.

Chapter 3 starts with Operation Wrath of God’s first targeted assassination: the shooting of Wael Zwaiter in Rome on 16 October 1972. After the killing, Italian intelligence asked for help from its Club de Berne partners to find Zwaiter’s assassins. The absurdity of this, of course, is that one of the partners who was supposed to help identify the murderer, was the murderer. This chapter analyses intelligence cooperation around four attempted or perpetrated Black September terrorist attacks, some of which will be revealed for the first time in this book. The chapter further highlights that several cables also served a second purpose for intelligence agencies. For example, agencies wanted to appear as powerful, relevant, well networked, and knowledgeable as possible about Palestinian conspiratorial activities as a way to cultivate their image in the eyes of their partners. The chapter outlines a few cases of such covert diplomacy where, through intelligence-sharing, agencies tried to change how they and their governments were perceived by other governments.