Yosef Alon

Yosef Alon (Hebrew: יוסף (ג'ו) אלון) born in Czechoslovakia as Josef Plaček, (July 25, 1929 – July 1, 1973) was an Israeli Air Force officer who was mysteriously shot and killed in the driveway of his home in Maryland, USA.

IAF career
Alon fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War as a fighter pilot and early member of the nascent Israeli Air Force, and would go on to complete 75 missions. When Israeli formed its first Mirage fighter jet squadron, Alon was assigned its commander. In 1970, then a colonel, Alon was chosen to be the assistant air and naval attache at Israel's Washington, D.C. embassy. Installed in what should have been a three-year assignment, Alon advocated strongly on Israeli arms procurement, especially regarding the F-4 Phantom.

Killing
On the night of June 30, 1973, Yosef Alon and his wife Dvora went to a dinner party organized for a departing embassy staffer. After two and a half hours of socializing and drinking, at roughly 12:30 am on July 1, the couple entered their Ford Galaxie and drove home to Chevy Chase, Maryland, arriving about a half-hour later. Dvora exited the vehicle and walked a few dozen feet to their porch while Alon gathered up his sports jacket on the back seat. At this moment Alon was shot five times by a foreign-made .38-caliber revolver, one shot fatally hitting his heart. Dvora rushed inside and called the police, seeing only a light-colored car drive away, and then returned to the front yard and attempted with her 18-year-old daughter Dalia to stem Alon's bleeding with towels. At 1:27 am, Alon died at the hospital.

Radio broadcast
Later on July 1, the Cairo-based Voice of Palestine broadcast that "After the assassination of martyr Mohammed Boudia 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."

Investigation
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 the Shin Bet, but was ultimately closed in March 1976 without discovering the perpetrators, according to the Associated Press. Sometime later CIA was reported to have been told by "Fedayeen senior official" that on the orders of Black September, two students, using Lebanese or Cypriot passports, had passed through the Canadian border and come to Washington, where with the help of a local professor, 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 to Dulles International Airport; from there they flew on to the West Coast, 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.

Dvora Alon died in 1995 without knowing the identity of her husband's killer.

In his book Chasing Shadows (Palgrave Macmillan), Fred Burton, former deputy chief of the counterterrorism division of the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Security Service, concludes after a lengthy investigation that Alon's killer was an agent from Black September. In the final pages of Burton's book, he writes that according to sources in the Mossad, the killer was "brought to justice." The implication is that the Mossad killed Alon's murderer in February 2011.