It was an unpleasant day in mid-January 1978 in Baghdad when Wadi Haddad began having severe stomach cramps after a routine meal. Haddad was the head of the Palestinian organization “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine” (PFLP). His appetite was gone, his weight had dropped to less than 25 pounds, and he was taken to an Iraqi public hospital. Jahan doctors diagnosed hepatitis. Doctors then said that it was a case of very bad cold, strong antibiotics were administered to him, Haddad was treated by the best doctors in Baghdad but his condition did not improve.
Ab’s hair soon began to fall out, the fever became more and more frequent, the needle of suspicion pointed to poison, but what poison and how it was administered, the doctors had no idea.
Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, then asked an aide to seek help from the East German secret service “STASI”. It was a time when the Soviets supported Palestinian fighters and provided them with passports, shelter, weapons and intelligence.
The Mossad did not take the death lightly, and Wadi Haddad became a priority for the Mossad.
Yasser Arafat’s speech at the United Nations in 1974 received worldwide acclaim and sympathy, but Haddad’s name appeared on the Mossad’s kill list and the Mossad began working to eliminate Haddad.
Eighteen months had passed since the operation at Entebbe. In the interim, Haddad was living peacefully in Baghdad and Beirut.
The Mossad did not want to make noise and spread in an Arab capital for the murder. Therefore, a firearm was unlikely. They needed to devise a method that would create the least amount of suspicion.
Now either the death had to appear to be natural, as if an illness had taken Wadi Haddad’s life, or an accident, such as a car accident somewhere.
The risk of arrest after a botched operation in the Arab capital was high. The Israelis did not want that.
Agent of Death
The task of killing Haddad was assigned to ‘Agent Sadness’, who had extensive access to both Haddad’s home and office.
On January 10, 1978, a year and a half after the Entebbe operation, a tube of Haddad’s toothpaste was replaced with the one containing his death. The tube of toothpaste contained a toxic substance produced at the Israel Institute for Biological Research in Ness Ziona, southeast of Tel Aviv.
The institute developed a toxin that could penetrate the membranes in Haddad’s mouth and enter the bloodstream while brushing his teeth. It gradually reached a large level and became fatal for Haddad.
Haddad’s assassination added a new phrase to the Mossad lexicon, “low-profile murders.” The mark was so low that it took almost three decades to reveal the cause of Haddad’s death. And even now, there are two versions of this story, written by two authors in two different books.
The first version in Aaron J. Klein’s book “Striking Back” attributed Haddad’s death to poisoned chocolate. According to him, a colleague offered Haddad his favorite Belgian chocolate, which was laced with an undetectable poison.
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Its second and more detailed version came 12 years later. In the 2018 book Rise and Kill First, Ronan Bergman writes in great detail about the murder of Haddad. Bergman devotes a chapter to Haddad’s murder in his book: “Death in Toothpaste”.
In an interview with The Times of Israel in 2018, Bergman talked about what happened after Haddad’s death.
Eighteen sent reports to Iraqi intelligence and told them you should look at your scientists and their toothpaste, he said. Because they suspected that the toothpaste was poisoned, and from then on, Iraqi intelligence ordered Iraqi scientists to take their toothpaste and toothbrushes with them whenever they left Iraq. Yet two of them were poisoned.