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.
