Last Updated on 31/07/2024 by Arun jain
It was January 1978. In Baghdad, Wadie Haddad started having severe stomach cramps after a regular meal. Haddad was the head of the Palestinian organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was not feeling hungry. He lost more than 25 pounds in weight. After this, he was taken to the Iraqi government hospital. The doctors there diagnosed him with hepatitis. Hard power antibiotics were given. Haddad was treated by the best doctors in Baghdad. But there was no improvement in his condition. Soon, his hair started falling. His fever was not coming down.
Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat asked an aide to seek help from East Germany’s secret service, the Stasi. This was the time when the Soviet Union helped Palestinian fighters and provided them with passports, shelter, weapons and intelligence.
When Arafat’s aides contacted the East German secret service, or Stasi, Haddad was flown from Baghdad to East Berlin. He was admitted to a hospital that treated members of the intelligence and secret-service community. It was March 19, 1978. By now Haddad had spent a very painful two months in the Baghdad hospital. When East Berlin intervened, Arafat hoped the outcome would be a little clearer. Haddad was admitted to the Regierungskrankenhaus. When transporting him by air from Baghdad, Haddad’s aides packed a bag of toiletries. It also contained a tube of toothpaste. When Haddad arrived in Berlin, he was a ‘dead man walking.’
Forty-one-year-old Hadad was admitted to a hospital in East Berlin. He was bleeding from several parts of his body. The pericardium around his heart was bleeding. He was bleeding from the root of his tongue, tonsils and urine. His platelet count had fallen drastically.
Haddad was in great pain for ten days. His screams could be heard throughout the East Berlin hospital and doctors had to keep him sedated all day and night. Then on March 29, Haddad died. An autopsy was then performed. The report said Haddad’s death was due to ‘panmyelopathy leading to bleeding on the brain and pneumonia’, and it was suspected that someone had murdered him.
What exactly happened to Wadi Hadad?
Wadie Haddad and PFLP chief Abu Hani plotted the Entebbe hijacking of Air France Flight 139 on June 27, 1976. The flight was flying from Tel Aviv to Paris via Athens. In Athens, 58 passengers boarded the plane. Among them were four hijackers.
Two PFLP terrorists, under Haddad’s direction, worked in conjunction with two Germans from the German Revolutionary Cell. The plane was flown to Benghazi, Libya, where the hijackers had to release Patricia Martel, a British-born Israeli citizen who faked a miscarriage by cutting herself. After Martel was freed, she flew to London and was questioned by British intelligence agency MI6 and Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The plane had to be grounded for seven hours in Benghazi to refuel. It then flew to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Operation Thunderbolt was largely carried out by Israel at Entebbe. A 29-member unit of Sayeret Matkal (the special reconnaissance unit of the Israeli General Staff), led by Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, succeeded in getting the hostages out. However, it came at a price. Israel lost Lieutenant Colonel Netanyahu in the Entebbe raid, and the operation was later renamed ‘Operation Yonatan’. Mossad did not take this lightly.
Wadie Haddad became part of the Mossad’s hit list. The Mossad began working to eliminate Haddad. Eighteen months had passed since the Entebbe raid. Meanwhile, Haddad was living peacefully in Baghdad, Iraq and Beirut, Lebanon.
Mossad did not want the execution to take place in the Arab capital. So they devised a way to arouse less suspicion. It had to show that Wadie Haddad had died of illness. The risk of being caught after a failed operation in the Arab capital was too high. The Israelis did not want that.
Agent of Death
The task of killing Hadad was assigned to ‘Agent Sadness’. Agent Sadness had access to both Hadad’s home and office. On January 10, 1978, 1.5 years after the Entebbe raid, the toothpaste that Hadad used daily was replaced with a tube of death. The toothpaste tube contained a poison developed at the Israel Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona, southeast of Tel Aviv. The institute developed a poison that could cross the mucous membranes in Hadad’s mouth. And each time he used the toothpaste it got absorbed into the blood. Slowly it reached a very lethal level and Hadad died.