considered an important agent after he led his case officer to a Fatah
contact man in Nablus whose address he had obtained from the Pales-
tine Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut. Before Sowan went to
meet this man in Nablus, the ISA case officers fitted him with an
electronic locating device. The PLO did not discover Sowan’s con-
tacts with the ISA. He was told to return to Beirut and inform the
Palestinians that the Israelis knew about him. In the meantime, he had
abandoned his plans to study in Jordan because he would have been
conscripted to the Jordanian army.
When he returned to Jerusalem in 1982, Sowan was introduced by
the ISA case officer to a Mossadcase officer, “Morris.” Morris asked
Sowan to move to Paris, expenses paid. He resumed his studies in the
French capital, from where he reported to another Mossad case officer,
“Adam,” on his fellow Palestinians in France. Next he was asked by
the Mossad to go to study in Great Britain. He was paid a monthly
salary of £600 plus expenses, a good wage for a man of his age. Sowan
was paying off for what the Israeli intelligence invested in him. In Eng-
land he became a close friend of Abdel Rahman Mustafa, a major in
Force 17, originally established by Ali Hassan Salamehas a body-
guard unit to protect Yasser Arafat and later turned into an offensive
rather than a defensive organization. Mustafa was an important target
for Israeli intelligence, suspected of involvement in the hijacking of a
Lufthansa passenger aircraft in 1972. He was so important that another
Israeli agent, Bashir Samara, a Druse from the Golan Heights, was sent
to trace him. Mustafa, then 37 years old, coordinated the 14-man team
that shot dead Ali al-Adhami.
Mustafa left England in April 1987 but deposited weapons and ex-
plosive materials in Sowan’s apartment in Hull, where Sowan had a
job as a research assistant in the Humberside College School of Fur-
ther Education. Mustafa returned to Britain in July 1987 under an as-
sumed name and asked Sowan if he could store more weapons in his
apartment. Sowan had been on vacation, visiting his family in
Jerusalem, when al-Adhami had been assassinated, but he heard
about the killing and realized that Mustafa was behind it. Sowan’s
case officers contacted him and urged him to return to Britain, where
he was of enormous value to them. He told his case officer how dan-
gerous it was for him to return after the assassination of al-Adhami.
The case officer nevertheless persuaded him to return. On arrivalSOWAN, ISMAIL• 27106-102 (04) Q-Z.qxd 3/24/06 7:26 AM Page 271