Lillehammer was not the sort of place where people expected professional killers. The Norwegian town was quiet enough for strangers to be noticed, unfamiliar cars remembered and unusual behavior discussed. It was better known for mountains, winter sports and tourists than political violence, and on a summer Saturday night in July 1973, there was little reason to imagine that an international intelligence operation was unfolding among its hotels, rental cars and residential streets.
Ahmed Bouchikhi had even less reason to imagine himself at the center of it. He was 30 years old, Moroccan-born and living in Norway, where he worked as a waiter. His life was not clandestine. He had no secret apartment, armed bodyguards or elaborate system for disappearing when somebody began following him. His Norwegian wife was pregnant, and together they had a home in Lillehammer and the ordinary concerns of a young family.
On the evening of July 21, Bouchikhi and his wife went to the movies. Afterward, they took a bus and began walking home, unaware that other people had spent days watching him. Bouchikhi did not know that strangers had compared his face with a photograph, discussed his identity and decided who they believed he was. Somewhere inside a secret process to which he had no access, an accusation had effectively become a verdict, and there would be no opportunity to challenge it.
At about 10.40 p.m., a light-colored car approached and two people got out. Thirteen .22-caliber bullets struck Bouchikhi as his pregnant wife watched him die. The killers drove away, apparently believing they had just eliminated a dangerous enemy. Instead, they had turned an obscure Norwegian murder investigation into one of the most damaging exposures in the history of Israeli intelligence.
Ahmed Bouchikhi was not the man they had come to kill. The people who killed him had crossed a continent to execute a stranger without ever properly establishing who he was.
