In the early hours of July 1, 1973, Col. Joe Alon was gunned down in the driveway of his Chevy Chase home. An Israeli Air Force attache, Alon was the first foreign diplomat killed on U.S. soil.
Despite joint efforts by the FBI, U.S. Department of State and the Montgomery County Police Department, the high-profile case was never solved.
A documentary film about the search for his killer was released this year.
“How could this be that our father, who served his country in the most patriotic way, was shot down in an official [diplomatic] position?” asked his daughter Rachel Alon. “In Washington, not in Beirut, and nobody is looking into it, nobody is sharing information?”
Joe Alon was born in 1929 to Czechoslovakian parents.
After they died in the Holocaust, Alon joined Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah and went on to help found the Israeli Air Force.
His body was returned to Israel in the belly of Air Force Two, the vice president’s plane.
Nearly 40 years after his assassination, the loss of their father is an open wound.
At the time of his death, Rachel was 5, Yael was 14, and Dalia was 18. Though Rachel was too young, Yael says she remembers everything.
For Dalia, who helped her mother press towels against her father’s bloody body while they waited for the ambulance, fighting for answers is too painful. But Rachel and Yael have her full support.
“It’s very difficult to explain, because you learn to live with the absence of a father,” Rachel said. “It was always in the background.”
His wife Dvora, who died in 1995, never remarried. Her heart still belonged to the love of her life, Rachel said.
“The fact that he’s dead in the ground didn’t mean anything to her,” she said.
Still, Dvora tried to give the girls a normal life in Israel, with friends, outings and birthday parties. Her daughters agree she did an excellent job.
The books and articles that have kept Alon’s memory alive over the last 40 years came from his family’s search for answers, said Yael, who came to town for the 22nd Washington Jewish Film Festival. A documentary about the murder, “Who Shot My Father? The Story of Joe Alon” by director Liora Amir Barmatz, was expected to premiere at the festival Tuesday night.
Alon’s death came at the height of Watergate, with the Cold War raging, and domestic unrest spreading from colleges to prisons.
“Then you get this shooting in this sleepy little town, and nobody is looking at this as an international act of terrorism because it was just beyond the imagination,” said Fred Burton, a former neighbor and special agent for the U.S. Department of State.
Burton also is the author of “Chasing Shadows: A Special Agent’s Lifelong Hunt to Bring a Cold War Assassin to Justice”, a book about his effort to track down Alon’s killer.
Burton was in high school with Dalia when Alon died, he said in an interview from Texas, where he is vice president of intelligence for private intelligence company STRATFOR.
By the mid-1980s, he was a special agent in the State Department’s counterterrorism division. With three agents assigned to prevent terrorist acts worldwide, it did not leave a lot of time for covering cold cases.
After learning of the family’s fight to find out who killed Alon, Burton started his own investigation in 2005.
“We appreciate Fred’s investigation enormously,” said Rachel.
Although it yielded few answers, the family conducted an investigation of its own. After a three-year court battle, Israel’s highest court ordered the Israeli government to turn over to the Alon family all files related to the murder. Until the order, Israeli officials insisted there were no files. They received redacted photocopies in 2008.
The family is certain that at least one Israeli official knows who killed Joe Alon, Rachel said.
“What could be, so many years after, so secret?” she asked. “What’s the big secret? What is everybody trying to protect, and why?”
Burton is certain he has identified the now deceased shooter, whose name was never revealed due to liability issues. That is not good enough for Alon’s daughters, who want to hear the truth from an official source.
“That’s why we’re here,” Yael said. “We hope someone will come forward and help get to the bottom of this, put an end to this story.”
The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington will present “Both Sides of the Camera: In Conversation about ‘Who Shot My Father?’ The Story of Joe Alon” at noon today at the Goethe-Institut, 812 7th St., NW, Washington, D.C. Tickets are $6. A kosher lunch with panelists is available for $15.
jablamsky@gazette.net
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