A Tempting Target

Israeli Consul General Ephraim Elrom, 58, a man of habit, was late for lunch. Disturbed, his wife Else phoned his Istanbul office. "Something's wrong," she said. "Ephraim is always so punctual."

Something was indeed wrong. Three hours earlier, four armed toughs from Turkey's extreme leftist People's Liberation Army, a guerrilla movement trained in Syria with Soviet backing, had entered the Elroms' apartment building. In a ground floor flat directly under the consul general's, they methodically overpowered and trussed up twelve people while waiting for Elrom's predictable 1 p.m. arrival. When the diplomat arrived and resisted, they slugged him on the head with a pistol butt and carried him off, wrapped in a gray blanket in the back seat of a car. Six hours later the kidnapers announced that Elrom would be executed by 5 p.m. last Thursday unless "all revolutionary guerrillas are set free." At the time, fewer than half a dozen were in custody.

Insolent Demands. The kidnaping incensed--and embarrassed--the two-month-old, military-backed government of Premier Nihat Erim. Eleven provinces have been under strict martial law since the end of April, yet the Liberation Army, which abducted and then released five U.S. servicemen earlier this year, was still able to nab Elrom.

Rejecting the guerrillas' demands as "insolent," the government ordered massive arrests of leftists; close to 1,000 were detained. The government also introduced a law in the Turkish Parliament making kidnaping punishable by death--even for those who simply withhold information concerning the crime. Istanbul's 6,000-man police force, meanwhile, combed the city, concentrating on the European side of the Bosporus. A note from Elrom had been mailed to his wife from Aksaray, a district in Istanbul's old quarter. "I am O.K.," he wrote. "Do not worry."

Elrom is the first Israeli diplomat to become a victim of urban guerrilla warfare anywhere, and the Israeli Cabinet promptly backed Turkey's tough stand against his abductors. A 23-year veteran of Israel's police force, Elrom was born Ephraim Hofstaedter in Poland, but after becoming a diplomat in 1969, he adopted a Hebrew surname--as is required of its envoys by the Israeli foreign service. Former head of Israel's criminal investigation department, Elrom was a key figure in gathering the evidence on which Adolf Eichmann was convicted, and acted as one of Eichmann's principal pretrial interrogators. As a Western diplomat noted: "He made a tempting target to Turkish anarchists seeking to ally themselves with the revolutionaries of the world." The deadline for his execution came and went, and at week's end his body was reportedly found in an empty Istanbul apartment.

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