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Yosef Alon | |
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| Native name | יוסף אלון |
| Born | (1929-07-25)July 25, 1929 |
| Died | July 1, 1973(1973-07-01) (aged 43) Chevy Chase, Maryland, U.S. |
| Allegiance | Israel |
| Branch |  Israeli Air Force |
| Service years | 1949–1973 |
| Rank | Colonel |
| Commands | 101 Squadron Hatzerim Airbase |
| Other work | Assistant Air and Naval Attaché to U.S |
Yosef (Joe) Alon (Hebrew: יוסף (ג'ו) אלון), bornJosef Plaček (July 25, 1929 – July 1, 1973), was anIsraeli Air Force officer and military attache to the U.S. who was shot and killed in the driveway of his home inChevy Chase, Maryland.[1] The killer was never identified and Alon's murder remains unsolved.
Alon was born Josef Plaček onkibbutzEin Harod to Jewish immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Siegfried 'Friedl' and Thekla Plaček. When he was two, his family returned to Czechoslovakia, where they settled inTeplice, in theSudetenland. Following the 1938Munich Agreement, which resulted in the annexation of Sudetenland toNazi Germany, Alon and his family moved toPrague.
On the eve ofWorld War II, Alon's father sent 10-year-old Josef and his elder brother David to the United Kingdom as part of theKindertransport program. He was then adopted by George and Jenny Davidson, a childless Christian couple.
Most of his family was wiped out duringthe Holocaust, with his parents being murdered atAuschwitz. Following the war, he returned to Czechoslovakia and attempted to start a career as a jeweler. He then graduated from a vocational school, and then enlisted in theCzechoslovak Air Force, where he successfully completed a pilot course.
Alon married Dvora Alon (née Kirat), aJewish immigrant from Yemen, in January 1954. They had three daughters; Dalia (born 1954), Yael (born 1959), and Rachel (born 1968).
In 1947, he volunteered for the first pilots' course in theSherut Avir, theHaganah's nascent air corps. Soon afterward, he moved back to Mandate Palestine, changed his name to Yosef Alon, and upon Israeli independence in 1948, was among the founding members of theIsraeli Air Force (IAF).[2]
Alon fought in the1948 Arab–Israeli War as afighter pilot and early member of the nascent IAF, and would go on to complete 75 missions. In 1953, he became one of Israel's first jet pilots. From 1953 to 1956, he flewGloster Meteor andDassault Ouragan aircraft in the IAF.[citation needed]
From August 1960 to August 1961 Alon served as aMystère IV pilot and as Commander of the101 Squadron, which was equipped with Mystère IV aircraft. In November 1961, he returned to command 101 Squadron as the IAF's firstMirage III squadron. In 1965, after attending a command and training course in England, Alon went on to head the Air Force safety industry. The highlights of his career in the IAF was the establishment of the Flying Safety branch and theHatzerim Airbase, which he commanded from 1966 to 1970.[citation needed]
In 1970, then a colonel, Alon was chosen to be the assistantair andnaval attache atIsrael's Embassy in Washington, DC.[3] Installed in what should have been a three-year assignment, Alon advocated strongly on Israeli arms procurement, especially regarding theF-4 Phantom.[citation needed] He also established close relationship with theAmerican Jewish community, assisted with the activities of theUnited Jewish Appeal, and gave lectures to students on Israel's cause.[citation needed]
On the night of June 30, 1973, 44-year-old Yosef Alon and his wife Dvora went to a dinner party for a departing Israeli embassy staffer.[4] At roughly 12:30 am on July 1, the couple entered theirFord Galaxie and drove home toChevy Chase, Maryland, arriving about a half-hour later. Dvora exited the vehicle and walked 20–30 feet to their porch, while Alon gathered up his sports jacket on the back seat.[5][4]
At this moment Alon was shot in his chest five times with copper-jacketed military bullets by a foreign-made.38 caliberrevolver, either anF.I.E. Titan Tiger or a GermanArminius.[citation needed] One shot that pierced his heart would soon prove to be fatal, while the other shots caused only minor wounds.[6][5][4] Dvora rushed inside and called the police, seeing only a light-colored car drive away, and then returned to the front yard.[5][4] She attempted with her 18-year-old daughter Dahlia to stem his bleeding with towels.[4] Alon was taken to a hospital, where he died at 1:27 am.[7]
Alon's family accepted PresidentRichard Nixon’s offer to repatriate Alon's body to Israel onboard anUSAFC-137 Stratoliner. The aircraft left the US fromAndrews Air Force Base inMaryland, arriving atLod Airport inTel Aviv, with his family onboard.[citation needed]
Alon is buried with full military honours atKiryat Shaul Military Cemetery.[citation needed]
Later on July 1 the Cairo-based Voice of Palestine broadcast that "After the assassination of martyrMohammed Boudia[8] at the hands of the Zionist intelligence elements in Paris, Colonel Yosef Alon... was executed... His is the first execution operation carried out against a Zionist official in the U.S."[6]
The FBI investigation, "Murder of Assistant Air Attache Col. Joseph Alon" (MURDA), quickly focused on a possible link with Arab terrorism, including following leads given by theShin Bet, but was ultimately closed in March 1976 without discovering the perpetrators, according to theAssociated Press.Sometime later, the CIA was reported to have been told by a "Fedayeen senior official" that on the orders ofBlack September, two students, usingLebanese orCypriot passports, had passed across the Canada–US border and come to Washington, where, with the help of a local professor, they had rented a car and got the weapons for the assassination. Afterwards, the students were reported to have abandoned the rental for another, which they used to get toDulles International Airport; from there they flew on to theWest Coast of the United States, East Asia, and finally the Middle East. This information was passed to the FBI in February 1977, but they could make no new progress, and the investigation was closed. The following year, the collected evidence for the case was destroyed by the Baltimore office of the FBI.[citation needed]
Dvora Alon died in 1995 without knowing the identity of her husband's killer.[10]
In his bookChasing Shadows (Palgrave Macmillan),Fred Burton, former deputy chief of the counterterrorism division of theU.S. State Department'sDiplomatic Security Service and vice-president of the private intelligence and consulting firmStratfor, concluded after a lengthy investigation that Alon's killer was an agent from Black September named Hassan Ali who was killed byMossad in 2011.[7]
The documentary filmWho Shot My Father? The Story of Joe Alon by Liora Amir Barmatz aired on theFirst Channel in Israel in April 2011. The historianUri Milstein and ColonelYakov Agassi presented a theory which said that Alon had been assassinated because he unwillingly learned about the conspiracy theory (theKissinger plan) for theYom Kippur War, which involved collusion between the US, Israel, and Egypt and was designed to allow entry for the US into the region as a "savior" (and future power broker) for both Israel and Egypt by stopping the fighting after previously agreed-upon objectives had been achieved.[citation needed]Ezer Weizman claimed that "Jo was killed because he knew something he should not know about." The film also claimed that generalShmuel Gonen had said to journalistAdam Baruch, who wrote in his book that he was killed "by one of our own" because he knew something he should not know about. ProfessorUri Bar-Joseph has rejected the theory and the findings.[11]
Due to a lead developed years earlier by journalistAdam Goldman, the FBI reopened the case in January 2017.[12] The new investigation involves information recently given to an agent by Venezuelan terroristCarlos the Jackal, that sometime after 1970 three American veterans sympathetic to the Palestinian cause,[13] one of them a "prominent formerBlack Panther," approached Mahmoud Ould Saleh, aMauritania-born manager of the Arabic Bookshop on the Rue Saint Victor in theLatin Quarter of Paris and member of the extremist Palestinian "rejection front" (killed in 1977.)[14][15] Saleh put them in touch with suspected Black September militantKamal Kheir Beik (later killed), known to have managed terror attacks including the 1975OPEC siege.[13] Every sale of the gun identified as the murder weapon, a .38-caliber revolver, that was sold east of theMississippi, has previously been identified by the FBI, which was tracing the purchasers of those guns.[13]
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