MIDDLE EAST: Deadly Battle of the Spooks

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MOURNING the eleven Israelis who were murdered by Arab guerrillas of the Black September movement at the Munich Olympics last fall, Premier Golda Meir promised a war to avenge them. Israel, she said, would fight "with assiduity and skill" on a "farflung, dangerous and vital front line." Mrs. Meir never explained where that front line was to be, but it is now becoming ominously evident. Across Europe and the Middle East, Israeli intelligence agents and Palestinian Arabs are fighting an ugly, deadly battle of attrition. For each, the targets and victims are the other side's suspected spies.

The two latest casualties in this battle of the spooks were killed two weeks ago, a day and 2,000 miles apart. On Cyprus, an Arab businessman named Hussein Bashir, 33, flipped off the light in his second-floor room in Nicosia's Olympic Hotel and climbed into bed. An explosion suddenly wrecked the room and killed Bashir. Although he traveled on a Syrian passport and headed a company called Palmyra Enterprises, Bashir is believed to have been the representative to Cyprus of Al Fatah, the principal Palestinian guerrilla organization. A bomb, apparently one that could be detonated electronically from a distance, had been concealed under Bashir's bed. An unidentified assassin had watched for the light to go out in the room and then pressed a detonator, setting off the bomb.

The next day an Israeli businessman known as Moshe Hanan Yshai was inexplicably shot twice while strolling on the Gran Via, Madrid's busiest street, in view of hundreds of shoppers. Sources in Jerusalem identified the victim as Baruch Cohen, 37, and admitted that he was employed by the Israeli government. His line of work was intelligence; Cohen was on the Gran Via tracking the man who was to shoot and kill him. Before he died, he identified his murderer as a member of Black September—which claimed credit for the assassination.

Another apparent victim of the war of the spooks was Mahmoud Hamshari, 34, the P.L.O.'s principal representative in France. When he answered a telephone call at his Paris apartment one day last December, a bomb placed beneath the telephone table detonated. Badly maimed, Hamshari lived for a month before dying from his wounds. Wa'il Zuaiter, 38, whom Israelis have accused of planning assaults on El Al jets, was waiting for the elevator at his Rome apartment building in October when someone—Rome police have never determined who—came along and shot him twelve times at close range.

Besides Cohen, one other Israeli official is known to have been killed in the war: Ami Shachori, 44, agricultural counselor in the Israeli embassy in Britain, was killed in his London office in September when he unknowingly opened a letter-bomb—one of many sent to Israeli officials round the world. Somewhat more ambiguous is the case of Khodr Kanou, 36, a Syrian journalist in Paris, who was shot to death in his apartment doorway three months ago. Kanou, it turned out, was a double agent; French police suspect that Palestinians killed him for exposing Black September operations.