Chapter Four
Dvora’s Quest
Israel, Summer and Fall 1973[AB1]
Dvora returned home to Israel with her daughters on July 3, 1973. Jewish tradition believes that a body should not be tampered with after death, which precludes embalming. Instead, the body is supposed to be returned to the creator as quickly as possible. As a result, Colonel Joseph Alon was buried right away upon the family’s arrival in Israel. He was laid to rest in an unremarkable wooden coffin and given a hero’s funeral.
A few days later, Dvora hosted a gathering of family friends at her home outside of Tel Aviv. Beyond Joe’s fellow fighter pilots, the attendees that evening included a veritable who’s-who of the Israeli civilian and military leadership,. I includingedamong the many dignitaries was Ezer Weizman, one of the founding members of the Israel Air Force and nephew of Israel’s first president, Professor Chaim Weizman. Ezer had learned to fly in the Royal Air Force during World War II after enlisting at age eighteen. During Israel’s struggle for independence, he had flown a Spitfire into some of the IAF’s first aerial engagements. Later, when he became the commander of the Air Force in 1958, he located his old Spitfire, painted it black with slashing horizontal stripes on either side of the fuselage, and used it as his personal aircraft for years. After serving as deputy chief of staff for the IDF, he retired in 1969 as a major general. By 1973, Weizman had become heavily involved in politics. In 1993, he served as Israel’s seventh president, resigning in 2000 after a financial scandal[AB2]. Decades after the memorial at Devora’s house, Joe Alon’s daughters would have a poignant encounter with General Weizman shortly before his death in 2005. [AB3]
General Moshe Dayan also came to the memorial that evening, which ended up causing a minor scene. He ha’d served with the British Army during World War II, where he ha’d lost an eye to a Vichy French bullet while scouting a river crossing in Lebanon in 1941. For the rest of his life, he wore a black eye patch that ultimately became his trademark—as recognizable in the Israeli Army as Patton’s ivory handled pistols were to American soldiers.
After leading a tank unit in the War of Independence, Moshe Dayan served as the IDF’s chief of staff during the 1950’s. When he retired in 1959, he joined the Israeli Labor Party and later served as Foreign Minister and Defense Minister in various cabinets. By 1973 he and Weizman—two old comrades-in-arms—had become political opponents, as Weizman had joined the conservative, right wing party.
The night of Josef Alon’s memorial, Ezer Weiznman was talking to perhaps the most unusual guest in attendance[AB4] when Moshe Dayan arrived with his wife. Weizman saw Dayan, quickly cut his conversation short and bolted from Dvora’s house. The sudden departure had nothing to do with politics, but everything to do with family dynamics. Moshe’s first wife had been the Weizman’s sister-in-law. After he Dayan divorced her and remarried, Weizman’s wife refused to be at the same functions with the one-eyed warrior.
The incident underscored how small a group the leadership elite in Israel was in 1973, a fact not lost upon the guest talking with General Weizman when he abruptly left.
And who was that guest? Weizman had been talking to Colonel Merrill A. McPeak, an Air Force Pentagon staff officer and jet pilot who had flown 258 combat missions over Vietnam at the controls of a North American F-100 Super Sabre fighter-bomber. He had become a close friend of the Alon family during his time in the Pentagon, and his presence at the memorial service would later explain why Josef had been in Maryland in 1973[AB5].
With all the political and military horsepower at Dvora’s house that night paying respect to her fallen husband, what happened to her in the months and years to come seems almost inexplicable for someone so well connected[AB6].
Following the memorial, Colonel McPeak returned to WashingtonD.C. The dignitaries and Israeli leaders stopped calling or visiting. In her grief, Dvora felt forgotten. Worse, she began to wonder if her husband had been forgotten as well.
For months, she waited to hear from her government on the status of the investigation into her husband’s death. As the weeks grew long, she found plenty of time to comb back through her memories leading up to Joe’s murder and she began to remember some unusual things. The trauma and numbness she had felt in the hours after his death faded, and in their place developed an abiding desire to know why her husband had been killed.
She Dvora waited for Israeli investigators to come interview her. Nobody ever did. She waited for the FBI to contact her again[AB7]. Months passed and she heard nothing from them either. She grew increasingly restless and decided to toaoke the initiative. She sought out her friends in the military and civilian leadership in hopes of gleaning some answers. She was met with stony silence every time. The reaction among their old friends was so unusual that she became suspicious. Why was this happening? What was the Israeli government trying to hide from her?
Meanwhile, the FBI had been trying to arrange a follow up interview. The discussion in the Trent Street house in the early hours of July 1, 1973 had yielded only one clue—Dvora’s sighting of the white sedan. The FBI wanted to talk to her further and see if she had remembered anything else.
In early 1974, the Israeli government finally authorized an FBI agent to travel to Middle East to sit down with Dvora for a detailed interview. Exactly why it took so long to secure permission has been lost in the shrouds of history. The Alon family believes their government stonewalled the FBI, and there is evidence that the Israelis did not want the Feds to question one of its citizens. But the time lapse may have been more a logistical delay than a deliberate one. The FBI had no direct channel to Israel in those days. To arrange for an FBI agent to get into Israel would have required ether the State Department’s help or the CIA’s. In either case, the involvement of another department would have complicated matter and required additional time to communicate back and forth.
Whatever the hold up, the legal attache’sattaché’s office in Rome dispatched an agent to Israel six months after the night of the murder. Years later, when I received the entire FBI case after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, I discovered that the entire Form 302 Interview Report from that meeting in Israel had been redacted.
What had Dvora told the FBI agent?
I had not tried to run down this lead until after I left the Diplomatic Security Service and no longer had the access my security clearance granted me. As a result, I was unable to piece together the nature of that interview until after Dvora’s daughters and I made contact thirty-three years after their father’s murder.
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I was at home one spring night in 2006, reading through the FBI case file as my family slept, when the phone rang. Such late hour Ccalls at such a late hour had long been a staple of my line of work, so it did not at first seem out of the ordinary. But when I answered, I heard two female voices coming to me on a scratchy international line.
Rachel and Yola had made contact with me. They took turns explaining how traumatic the death of their father had been, and as I listened to the obvious pain in the voices, I could not help but feel their despair. They had lived their entire lives without answers, a fact that steeled my resolve to solve reopen [AB8]the case.
When I started asking them questions about their father and the investigation in Israel, both Yola and Rachel teared up. They told me that their lines were tapped, and just calling me may have placed me in danger. This struck me as very odd. Why would anyone want to tap the phones of Joe Alon’s daughters three decades after his death?
I asked them this. Silence greeted my question at first. At last, Yola began to talk.
Dvora had spent the rest of her life searching for answers[AB9]. She owed her husband that, and out of loyalty to him and fierce inner desire to know the truth, she kept going despite all the obstacles thrown in her way. Her lifelong pursuit of the truth laid the groundwork for her children to follow her when she was no longer able to continue. Dalia refused to get involved. She ha’d experienced enough heartbreak, so she withdrew and refused to speak of her father after she had a family of her own.
Rachel and Yola chose the opposite path. When As soon as they were old enough, they joined forces with their mother. As a result, she told them everything she could remember about the night of the murder and the events prior to it. Spellbound, I listened to some of what had to have been the redacted from the FBI 302 report on the interview with Dvora Alon in 1973.
About a week before the June 30 party, Dvora began to feel like she was being watched. At first, it was just that odd, tingly sensation people have reported when a hidden intruder has their eyes on them. But one morning, while Dvora was workinged in the kitchen, she glanced up to see someone staring at her through the window. In flash, he moved away, and no trace of him was ever found. Her glimpse was so fleeting that she was unable to give a description of him, other than his gender.
Then came the phone call. The Alons had lived on Trent Street for almost three years. Their names were in the Bethesda phone book as they had made no effort to conceal themselves. They were in America after all, what need was there for security?
Dvora answered the phone. A man asked in Hebrew to talk with a person whose name she found unfamiliar. She told the caller that the individual did not live at the address and that he must have the wrong number. He hung up without saying another word. After the murder, Dvora thought remembered that call was veryand thought it strange. What are the odds of a wrong number in speaking to her in her own language?that someone dialing the wrong number would be able to speak her language.
A few days before 1 July 1, 1973, somebody came to the Trent Street’s front door and rang the bell. When Dvora answered, a man wearing a Washington Gas Light Company’s uniform greeted her brusquely. He told her he was a meter reader and he needed to check her gas lines in the basement. Thinking nothing of it, Dvora opened the door and let the man inside. As Dvora worked was busy upstairs on with domestic tasks, the man disappeared into the basement for several minutes, then left the house without saying another word to her.
It turned out, there were no gas lines in the basement. After deliberating on this encounter for months, Dvora thought he might have accessed the basement to tap their phone line.
While I was with the Diplomatic Security Service, I had spent considerable time studying assassinations and terrorist attacks in an effort to find ways to discover and foil such plots before they could be carried out. This had real consequences on our job at the time, since part of the DSS’s mission included protecting foreign dignitaries in the same way the Secret Service provides security for the President of the United States. In my years with the DSS, I took part in many such operations when individuals such as Princess Diana and Yassear Arafat paid visits to the United States. In one memorable assignment, I was tasked with helping protect an Italian diplomat who was in bed with the mafia. We spent a spent a night in New York protecting him as he spoke with his mob associates at a restaurant that was under surveillance by the FBI.[AB10]
In those years, we began to realize that the bubble of protection we bodyguards could provide was actually quite small and could be easily penetrated quite easily. This happened in the early 1990’s to the Israelis when a lone gunman assassinated Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin in Tel Aviv.
We developed a means to expand that bubble. Instead of simply posting bodyguards, we attached surveillance teams to our all security details. Their job was to scan for threats, before and during the dignitary’s visit. They looked for anything out of the ordinary from whether it was a man who lingered too long in one place for no apparent reason to or agitated onlookers and other warning signs.
After analyzing assassination and terrorist attacks, we discovered a pattern that most of the professional ones shared[AB11]. First, the organization carrying out the attack would develop a target list. What were they going to strike and why? Once theat target was selected, operatives would be sent out to conduct pre-operational surveillance. They would study the target from afar, perhaps take photos and draw maps. They would gather intelligence on the security around the target, determine the best entrance and egress routes the attack team should use. Once all that was compiled, it would be used to plan the operation and brief those assigned to carry it out.
When I left the DSS and joined Strategic Forecasting, I continued working in this field for private individuals and organizations. More than once, after 9/11 our efforts detected such pre-operational surveillance across the country after 911. In one case, Arab males using video cameras had conducted such similar reconnaissance on Jewish community centers and day care facilities in multiple cities simultaneously. Cameras we had installed caught them in the act.
Such Having the attacker’s reconnaissance information could lead to heightened security and a change in the target location’s patterns. At times, Wwe have learned that often, the best time to foil a terrorist attack or assassination is not when it is underway, but when it is in the pre-operational surveillance stage. Make it difficult for the scout team to get intelligence on the target and more often than not they will abandon it and look for something easier to hit.
That night, as I listened to Joe Alon’s two daughters tell me the things Dvora experienced before her husband’s murder, it became clear to me that the Trent Street house had been the target of a pre-operational surveillance mission.
First, there was the physical presence of a stranger moving around on the property. Perhaps he could have been a mere voyeur or peeping tom, and I woul’d have considered that more plausible had not the other things not taken place in such close order to Dvora’s discovery seeing of him outside the kitchen window. The kitchen was located on the right side of the house on the opposite end to the garage. Whoever had been watching herthe man was, he hadn’t just been standing in the front yard and thus was nocould not be a mere passerby either. He ha’d moved off the sidewalk and stationed himself in the side yard. Was he trying to determine who was home? Was he gathering information on the physical layout of the house and neighborhood? This late in the game, there was no way to tell. But Iif he was, as I suspect, part of a pre-operational surveillance team, that would have been his primary mission would have been to gather information on who was home and the physical layout of the house and neighborhood.
The phone call was the next red flag for me. Back in the days before cell phones and instant communication, intelligence agencies and terrorist organizations frequently employed the telephone to locate a target. In the espionage business, this iwas known as a “ruse call.” Once it was placed, it could fix a human target’s location if he or she answered the phone. If the target didn’t pick up, that was equally useful information as well. It could mean that the target was not in the location where the hit would take place.
Whoever made the call to the Trent Street house in June, 1973, knew Dvora and her family spoke Hebrew as their primary language. That suggested a familiarity with who they were, or at least where they were from. Was this a ruse call? And if Joe had answered the phone instead of Dvora, would that have triggered his death that day?
I pondered this long after I said goodnight to Yola and Rachel. [AB12]When taken just on its own, the phone call seemed highly unusual. Beyond that, everything else was speculation. With the event happeningSo many decades agohad passed, there was no way to get phone records and trace the call. It became another cold lead that suggested much, but revealed little. The entire case had been that way for me.