The FBI has reportedly reopened its investigation into the 1973 murder of the Israeli air force attaché to Washington, after new information supplied by infamous international terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez also known as Carlos the Jackal.
According to Adam Goldberg, a reporter for the New York Times investigating the murder of Yosef (Joe) Alon, the FBI decided to reexamine the case after a letter from Carlos the Jackal piqued the interest of agents in Paris.
Carlos, they thought, might have the missing piece in the murder case that has remained unsolved for over 40 years, but which has been blamed on Palestinian terrorists.
In the New York Times, Goldberg describes how his investigation into the murder of Alon the only instance of an Israeli official being assassinated on U.S. soil led him to contact Ramírez,
now serving life sentence in a French prison.
Ramírez responded in a letter and agreed to speak to him, but for a fee.
Goldberg declined to pay Ramírez, however, and dropped his investigation.
However, the letter Ramírez sent Goldberg was enough to reignite interest in a case which has long been considered cold.
Last month, the reporter claims, FBI agents admitted that the agency had reopened the case after Eugene Casey, a Paris-based agent, interviewed Ramírez for 15 hours over a year and a half starting in February 2014.
According to the report, Ramírez told the FBI that during the 1970s, a number of American Vietnam war veterans arrived in Paris and began to frequent a bookstore run by Palestinians.
There they reportedly met Kamal Kheir Beik, a Syrian who was a member of the Black September pro-Palestinian terror group.
Asked how they could help the Palestinian cause, Beik suggested they kill Col. Joe Alon.
“When Alon was killed, we all wondered who had done it,” Ramírez is quoted as telling the FBI. “We were obviously all very happy,” he said, but “contact with the volunteers who executed the operation in Washington was lost long ago.”
Accordingly, he told the reporter in their first correspondence, he could “disclose the unusual manner in which ‘Operation Alon’ came to be.”
The details provided by the international terrorist were not fully corroborated, but the bookstore, for example, was found to be real.
However, two of the three Americans named in the investigation were unable to confirm the details of the incident and a third was dead.
The New York Times reported today (Monday) that the FBI has resumed its investigation into the murder of the military attaché at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Joe Alon, who was shot dead 43 years ago.
Reporter Adam Goldman reveals that the international terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal”, imprisoned in Paris, claimed to him that he knew who killed the Israeli attaché .
An FBI agent went to Paris and met with Carlos, who told him that behind the assassination stood a senior official of the terror group “Black September” – Kamal Chir Beck. According to Carlos, a group of American Vietnam War veterans who lived in Paris and sympathized with the Arabs against Israel contacted Beck who ordered them to kill Alon. Beck himself was in close contact with Carlos and helped the famous terrorist plan the hijacking of the OPEC Conference in Vienna in the mid-70’s. Beck was then killed in Beirut.
Alon, who was a fighter pilot during the War of Independence, was a war hero who completed 75 missions. When Israeli formed its first Mirage fighter jet squadron, Alon was assigned its commander. He had been sent to Washington in 1970 for what was supposed to be a three-year assignment to procure Israel needed up-to-date weaponry, such as F-4 Phantoms.
Joe Alon, married with three daughters, was murdered in 1973 shortly before he was due to finish his diplomatic mission in Washington.