By Way of Deception

BY WAY OF DECEPTION 205was fitted with a heavy metal plate at the bottom so that it wouldblow up, not down, when pressure was placed on it.On June 28, 1973, Boudia left the apartment building, performedhis usual check, then opened the driver's door and hopped ontothe seat. As he was closing the door, the car blew up, killing himinstantly. The force of the blast was so strong that many of thenuts and bolts went right through his body and peppered the roofof the car.The French police, who knew his association with terrorist groups,believed he was blown up by accident when explosives he wascarrying went off, a conclusion often reported by various policedepartments in lieu of other explanations.Even though Black September had no direct evidence that theMossad had killed Boudia, they knew it was so. They ordered theimmediate revenge killing of an Israeli. A Palestinian student atUCLA, in southern California, was ordered to get a gun and go tothe Israeli embassy in Washington. They reasoned that a completeunknown could do a hit and escape much more easily thansomeone who had been involved in a terrorist group and might betailed by U.S. intelligence. And so, on July 1, 1973, anunidentified young man walked up to Colonel Yosef Alon, theassistant air attaché at the embassy, shot him dead on the street,and fled. The gunman was never caught. The Mossad learned ofthis tie-in with the Boudia operation later, from somedocumentation captured after the Yom Kippur War.After Boudia's assassination, Moukharbel notified Riff that BlackSeptember had brought the Venezuelan, Sanchez, to Paris to runtheir European operation. The Mossad knew very little about him,but they quickly found out that his favorite alias was CarlosRamirez — or later, simply Carlos. He would soon become one ofthe most famous and feared men in the world.* * *Ali Hassan Salameh, not a stupid man himself, was busy settingup his own personal security. He wanted to avoid the Mossad andto make Israel look bad at the same time. So he