Juval Aviv: The good assassin

It is best with Juval Aviv to begin with what is verifiable. There is the man: a genial, charming, dapper grandfather, holding court in a Westminster hotel café. There is the book: Aviv's first novel, Max, an entertaining blockbuster which unravels an extraordinary conspiracy behind the mysterious death at sea of a thinly disguised newspaper baron called Maxwell Robertson. There is the day job: Aviv bears a folder of press releases that chronicle the doings of his investigation firm Interfor, which he founded in New York in 1979, and list his appearances as pundit and lecturer holding forth on security and terrorism (he has written two books on personal security, Staying Safe and The Complete Terrorism Survival Guide).

And then there is the back story. Aviv's press biography puts it like this: "Before founding Interfor, Mr Aviv served as an officer in the Israeli Defence Force (Major, retired), leading an elite commando/intelligence unit, and was later selected by the Israeli Secret Service (Mossad) to participate in a number of intelligence and special operations in many countries in the late 1960s and 1970s."

Behind this bland resumé lurks one of the great legends of modern espionage: Operation Wrath of God, the - always officially denied - campaign, launched by Israel in the wake of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, to hunt down and kill alleged Palestinian terrorists around the world.

Wrath of God was the beginning of a distinctively Israeli defence policy, of targeting individuals instead of institutions. It has been echoed in any number of assassinations of prominent figures in Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and in last week's suggestions that the Hizbollah leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, is on Israel's target list as its onslaught against Lebanon intensifies. Interest in Wrath of God was recently reinvigorated by Steven Spielberg's Munich, which was based substantially on George Jonas's 1984 book Vengeance, which in turn was based substantially on the recollections of Juval Aviv. It is commonly assumed that Aviv is the model for Avner, the central character played by Eric Bana in Munich: a patriotic assassin plagued by doubts as the body count climbs without making his country noticeably safer.

"I can't tell you that I am Avner," says Aviv. "There is no statute of limitations for those events. But I think the film is very accurate. It's a true account of the inner workings, the issues the agents had during the operations."

There are those who dispute this. Yossi Melman, an Israeli author and journalist who specialises in intelligence issues, has alleged that the highest Aviv rose in Israel's security apparatus was to the position of gate guard for El-Al. Aviv ascribes Melman's animus to his refusal to co-operate on a book. Melman, contacted for this article at Haaretz newspaper, retorts: "Juval Aviv is lying. I never asked him to write a book together."

General Zvi Zamir, head of Mossad at the time of Munich, has denied knowing Aviv - but then secret services are not known for identifying past employees ordered to carry out extra-judicial executions on the soil of friendly nations (Wrath of God victims fell in Italy, France and Cyprus, among other places).

"When I took the mission on," says Aviv, "I was told, and I understood, and I accepted, that we were creating a team which had deniability. Israel doesn't want to be officially associated."

Aviv is convincing. He recalls the meeting at which Israel's then Prime Minister, Golda Meir, turned his team loose, discusses the emotional impact of Spielberg's film on his family, and the persistent spectres that haunt his memory. If his rendition of a morally uncertain assassin is an act, it's up there with Eric Bana's stellar turn in Munich.

"I'm not proud of that part of my life," he says, "but if I had to do it again I probably would, because at that time, under those circumstances... I think it was a good idea to start with. It was more an emotional reaction, of getting revenge. But did it save the world? No. That's the frustration, you go through those things, you lose comrades..."

He shrugs, and offers another sad smile. Aviv still visits Israel regularly, but seems to have lost the righteous certainty that once kept his pistol hand steady.

"Terrorism," he says, "is a weapon of the poor. The mechanism of armies is not going to win. The thinking about Israel creating those small teams like ours was psychological, to scare people, to make it clear we could do anything they could do, so why don't we both stop. That was naive. When you don't have anything to eat, when you don't have any future, you don't care about the odds, and you don't think about tomorrow, because in your mind there is no tomorrow."

As we talk, Israel is sending its armies into Gaza in retaliation for the capture of one Israeli soldier, and not for the first time resembling a man attempting to swat wasps with a sledgehammer. A few days after our meeting, and Hizbollah has upped the ante by capturing two Israeli soldiers, prompting a similarly spectacular, and nigh-certainly futile, military response. Asked what he'd have told Golda Meir then if he knew what he knows now, Aviv replies: "Israel should have gone out of their way to help Palestinians into the 20th century. We had an opportunity. We could, with them, have gone to the rich nations and said we are in a war that will never end, unless there is an economic solution. The Marshall Plan is missing. The only way to beat it is economically. Give them hope. Every time we kill someone, two others take their place. Are we going to do this for ever?"

Aviv now claims to be helping America with its war on terror, as a consultant to the CIA - indeed, he sports a CIA lapel pin (the CIA's public affairs officedeclines to comment on any association). Aviv's press pack includes a copy of a certificate of appreciation from the FBI for "exceptional service in the public interest", which Aviv says is a reward for his service as a consultant (the FBI's public affairs office notes that these are also often issued to guest speakers).

What is beyond doubt is that Aviv played a major role in one terrorism story. He and his company were retained by PanAm to investigate the Lockerbie bombing. Aviv concluded the perpetrators were not the Libyans eventually convicted, but Iran-backed Palestinian terrorists who were able to smuggle their bomb on board due to a drug-running operation that the CIA was allowing to proceed for intelligence-gathering purposes.

"Lockerbie will be the next book," he says. Aviv wants to redeploy the same central character, a disaffected Mossad agent called Sam Woolfman, in a series of novels based on Aviv's investigations and experiences as a Mossad operative. Given the author, any reader will find themselves wondering whether Aviv is seeking to spin entertaining yarns, or attempting to smuggle extraordinary, scandalous, belief-beggaring truth inside fiction.

"I don't want to cherry-pick what is real and what isn't," he smiles. "If I wanted to do that, I would write non-fiction, but I wouldn't survive. I'm not stupid."

'Max' by Juval Aviv is published by Century (£11.99)

Briefing: Speaker, writer, soldier, spy

Juval Aviv was born in Israel in 1947. He has been CEO of New York-based investigations firm Interfor from 1979 to the present, in which capacity he has undertaken many high-profile cases, including heading PanAm's investigation into the Lockerbie bombing. Before that, he served in the Israeli Defence Force, attaining the rank of major, and in Mossad during the 1960s and 1970s, during which time he is believed to have been part of Operation Wrath of God. He is also a consultant and pundit on terrorism and security.

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