Ali Hassan Salameh

On 22 January 1979, Salameh was in a convoy of two Chevrolet station wagons headed from Rizk's flat to his mother's for a birthday party. Chambers was on her balcony painting, with her red Volkswagen parked below on Rue Verdun (an upscale commercial and residential street in Beirut). As Salameh's convoy passed the Volkswagen at 3:35 pm and turned onto Rue Madame Curie, 100 kg of explosive attached to the car by a fellow Mossad agent was remotely exploded, either by Chambers or on her signal to another Mossad agent.

Salameh was buried in Beirut after a public funeral ceremony attended by Yasser Arafat and about 20,000 Palestinians on 24 January 1979.

As a result of the failure in Lillehammer and his alleged CIA protection, Salameh felt relatively safe. Having lived under cover in various parts of the Middle East and Europe, in 1978 he married Georgina Rizk, a Lebanese celebrity who had been Miss Universe seven years earlier in 1971. The couple spent their honeymoon in Hawaii and then stayed at Disneyland in California. When Rizk became pregnant, she returned to her flat in Beirut where Salameh also rented a separate apartment. Rizk was six months pregnant at the time of his death. Their son Ali Salameh is a political science graduate who studied in Canada. By a prior marriage he was a grandson-in-law of Mohammad Amin al-Husayni. He had two sons from his first marriage to Um Hassan.

He was known for flaunting his wealth, being surrounded by women and driving sports cars, and having popular appeal among Palestinian young men; his nickname underlined his popularity—the "Red Prince". He served as the security chief of Fatah. After the Munich massacre during the 1972 Olympic Games, he was hunted by the Israeli Mossad during Operation Wrath of God. In 1973, Mossad agents killed an innocent Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchiki, in what became known as the Lillehammer affair in Norway, mistaking Bouchiki for Salameh, and resulting in the arrest of some of the Israeli agents.

Salameh served as the key bridge between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1970 until his death. The PLO, at the request of the US, had undertaken steps to help ensure the security of both the US Embassy—Salameh responded by posting a PLO guard unit there—and, more generally, American citizens resident in Lebanon. The contacts later developed more extensively as the PLO offered its intelligence assistance in regard to larger regional issues. The US had undertaken with Israel to avoid contacts with the PLO, but US security interests under Gerald Ford, on the advice of Henry Kissinger, enabled an unofficial relationship which, when discovered by Israel, deeply disturbed officials in Tel-Aviv. When asked by the Israelis, US officials denied the relationship. Israel decided to kill him in order to disrupt the channels between the US and the PLO.

Ali Hassan Salameh (Arabic: علي حسن سلامة, ʿAlī Ḥasan Salāmah; 1 April 1941 – 22 January 1979) was a Palestinian militant who was the chief of operations (code name Abu Hassan) for Black September, the organization responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre and other terror attacks. He was also the founder of Force 17. He was assassinated by Mossad in January 1979 as part of Operation Wrath of God.

Salameh was born in the Palestinian town of Qula, near the city of Jaffa, to a wealthy family on 1 April 1941. He was the son of Shaykh Hassan Salameh, who was killed in action by the Israeli army during the 1948 Palestine war near Lydda. Ali Salameh was educated in Germany and is thought to have received his military training in Cairo and Moscow.