“Get their press IDs,” the CIA guy, or whatever the hell he was, said. Ohhhh no you don’t! To part with that meant never ending hardship during the Olympic duration. Down the stairs I went. They didn’t try to stop me. Larry was on his feet by now. They had his press pass. I got him out of the dorm, a bit shaky, but he was a tough little guy and he turned out to be OK. Except that he didn’t get his credential back for a couple of days, each one involving reporting to the security HQ until they figured that he’d learned his lesson.
“Heil Hitler, you bastards!” Frenn was yelling. “Zieg heil, you sons of bitches!” An athlete actually on our side? Wow!
By now the place was buzzing, writers, photographers, TV cameramen, all outside the American dorm, looking for answers, trying to pin this monumental foul-up on somebody, anybody. Stan Wright, the assistant track coach, took the fall. It was his job to get the sprinters to the stadium. Robinson and Hart caught their share of heat as well. Pampered athletes, who couldn’t even find their way to the bathroom unless someone led them there, was the general tone. I laid it off mostly on Bowerman, plus the American Olympic brass that couldn’t even assign someone to making sure they had correct schedules.
That night Wright faced the few writers who had been told about the informal press conference that had been arranged at an ABC-TV studio. That’s the way they did things over there. Everything sotto voce. He took the blame. He mentioned that the schedule was mistaken. “My God,” I said to somebody. “They still don’t know the one they have is obsolete.”
Hart was supposed to say his piece after Wright got through. It would be the only statement we’d get from one of the runners. It never happened. As soon as Wright finished, Ralph Boston, the former long jump champion who was working this Olympics as a “runner” for ABC, grabbed Hart, pulled him outside, and they took off, sprinting to a pre-arranged sub-studio where Howard Cosell was waiting for an exclusive interview. A beautiful double-cross.
I can feel it right now, standing outside, watching them disappearing, finally yelling like a disgruntled suitor heaving a shoe at the wedding procession, “I’ll never forget this, Ralph!” He gave me a wave without turning around. A great athlete, yes. A great competitor. But he’ll never get a Christmas card from me.
Following almost immediately came Crisis No. 3. Rick DeMont, a 16-year-old swimmer from San Rafael, Calif., had been stripped of his gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle and was suspended from further competition because he had taken Marax, an asthma medicine he had used since he was a child. It contained a banned substance, ephedrine. This was in the pre-steroid testing era. Ephedrine was listed as a stimulant.
We rushed through our stories about the missed heats of the 100, assigned blame, agonized, moralized, drew conclusions and wheeled 180 degrees to meet this new emergency. We had a one-page statement and little else. Where to turn? The American swimming federation was of little help. If you could find someone to quote, he’d generally shrug and say, “Let’s not be too eager to assign blame,” the same as the track people said, except for poor Stan Wright. It had become an American mantra. The most sensible statement of all came from a Belgian, and a royal one at that, Prince Alexandre de Merode, the chairman of the IOC’s Medical Council. He laid the blame squarely on the U.S. doctors. DeMont had correctly listed Marax as a medication he took. It was up to the American medical staff to forward the information to the IOC for clearance. No one did.
“A 16-year-old boy is being made to pay for the sins of people who should know better,” Prince de Merode said. “The medical authorities from other countries all submitted the names of drugs for clearance. Why didn’t the Americans?”
Why indeed? Stories were being written and rewritten and filed and then rewritten again. Deadlines were being blown, nerves were fraying. We needed a quote from Dr. Winston Riehl, the head physician of the American Olympic team. Unavailable, of course. Never available for the entire Olympic period. His statement came a month later in a forum that allowed no questioning, a bylined article in the American Medical News, house organ for the AMA. Dr. Riehl’s statement was that it was up to the boy himself to get information to the IOC. If he would have pulled a stunt like that at a press conference, he would have been laughed off the podium, but this was the friendly arena of a doctor talking to doctors.
Of course we didn’t know this at the time. We were a thrashing mass of writers, trying to get the thing sorted out, fully unable to grasp the monumental incompetence of the American Olympic contingent. And it was all happening under deadline pressure and intense competition.
I saw a lot of good writers crack up that night — just too many crises on top of each other. Next to me in the press room, Stan Hochman, a tough columnist from Philadelphia, leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling and murmured, “I just can’t go anymore. I can’t do it. It’s too much.” I had seen this happen before … hell, it had happened to me. I had been talked through more than one impossible story by an older colleague.
“Come on, Stan,” I told him. “Lead with the Merode quote. Take a rip at the American doctors for not being here. Go get ’em.” So he went back to his typewriter. So did I. And if someone were to tell us that this was just window dressing compared to what lay ahead, I wouldn’t have believed him.
Since Munich, I must have read 100 reports of the events leading up to, and after, the killing of the 11 Israelis and five Palestinian terrorists and a German policeman. I have interviewed survivors. I sat through a phony Steven Spielberg movie about Israeli retribution based on the story of a self-proclaimed Mossad operative who actually had failed basic training in the Israeli defense force and was employed as a gate guard for El Al Airlines in New York. I cannot add anything by weighing in with my own version of what happened on September 5 or what went wrong. But I can tell you what I saw in the Olympic Village that day and what it was like during that period and afterward.
And I can tell you what it is like to have your spirit crushed by the realization that the bulk of the people you are there to write about have little conception of death or suffering or anything except their own limited sphere. Of course I knew all this already, that if someone claiming to be a reporter would try to pump his own set of values into other people, he’d be better off writing essays or addressing study groups. But the message in Munich was so dramatic that it startled me. They just don’t care. It’s all meaningless to them. Maybe the idea was more poignant because it involved the doomed Israelis whom they didn’t care about, Jews, my own people. The us-against-them syndrome. But I had been through the army and a lifetime of organized sports, venues which at times were not particularly receptive to the chosen people without major mishap. This, however, was different.
When I woke up on Tuesday, Sept. 5, the takeover of the Israeli compound was all over the news. I went by the press center. TVs were on everywhere. Announcements would be forthcoming, we were told, when something new was learned. I’ve always hated the deadening atmosphere of the official press center at just about every major sports event, waiting for press conferences, the milling about, the interviewing of one other. Sometimes you can’t avoid it. You’re pinned, such as at the Super Bowls these days and, I would assume, at the recent Olympics, from what people have told me. But security was loose at Munich. That’s how the Palestinians had managed to infiltrate the Israeli dorm with such apparent ease. It was still early on this Tuesday morning, maybe still time to get into the Olympic Village, to see for myself what was going on.
I had my rental car and my homemade parking pass, with an ABC-TV logo and all sorts of other colorful nonsense and a gray blurry picture of myself next to the lettering I had done with my own hand: DURCHFAHRT. “Drive Through.” In previous days it had gotten me into the garage next to the village but not this time. They were in the process of firming up security. I parked in the street and approached the main gate. Two lines were being formed. The Olympic Organizing Committee had brag
ged that in honor of The Carefree Olympics they would arm their security people only with walkie-talkies, certainly not guns, but that bit of fluff was over.
I showed my press credential. I was waved away. I turned, took two steps, cut back and bolted for what looked like the least organized part of the phalanx. My God, I had gotten through. Whack! It was like running into a tree branch while you were looking behind you. I had been knocked to my knees by a rifle butt in the side of the head. I scrambled up and tried to keep running. People were shouting. They had a choice: break ranks and chase me, start shooting or just let this lunatic go. They chose the latter.
“Loony, loony, loony!” a couple of writers told me later. “They were ready for anything. Terrorists had gotten in. You could have gotten shot … SHOULD have gotten shot. What the hell were you thinking of?”
I was thinking of nothing except that my head hurt, and that’s the truth.
I found the Israeli dorm at 31 Connollystrasse. Ropes had been stretched in front of it. The drama already was being played out, the masked terrorist negotiating with the police, the guy with the white hat. Across the street was the Italian dorm. I went up to the roof and found a vantage point. People were coming up there in twos and threes. Someone had a radio, news of the hostage crisis interspersed with music. We watched. Not a whole lot was happening. After a while a table was set up. Someone brought a couple of bottles. There were glasses, sandwiches. “My God,” I thought. “It’s turned into a cocktail party.”
I went downstairs and took a look around the area. I heard music coming from the athletes’ recreation area 300 yards away. Rock music, accompanied by the cling-cling of pinball machines. It was a pretty day. On a grassy patch nearby, you could see the slow gyrations of the athletes dancing to the music. The miniature golf course was getting plenty of action, the oversized checker board, the ping pong tables. Recreation as usual. Very few people showed an interest in the drama of life and death that was taking place down the street where nine bound Israelis stared into the mouths of Kalashnikov-47’s … they had less than 12 hours to live. It was a picture of widespread indifference.
I walked back to the roped off area in front of 31 Connollystrasse. Negotiations were still going on between the terrorists — at first thought to be members of a special group called Black September but later identified by Abu Daoud, who planned the attack, as Fatah agents of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization — and the security forces. John Forster, an American rower whom I knew, stood alongside and watched with me.
“I walked around there, trying to find out how a guy could play a pinball machine when people were facing death a few hundred yards away,” he said. “A couple of kayakers just walked by here. They were talking about their race. You wonder about people’s order of priorities. Over there by the ping pong tables, everyone’s still on vacation. They just don’t know what a crisis is. For them all this is just the six o’clock news. Just part of the Disneyland they’re living in.”
I started writing and phoning it in to the Post in pieces. The Post was an afternoon paper that could do updates all day long, allowing for the six-hour time difference. I hunted down Shaul Ladany, a 50-kilometer race walker on the Israeli team whom I’d known when he competed indoors in New York. He’d been a professor in the Rutgers Business School. I found a little room where we could talk. There were no other writers around. The ABC-TV crew had gotten into the village that day, but no other reporters.
“Instead of coming to the room where I lived with the fencers and marksmen,” he said, “the terrorists went to the strongmen’s room, the wrestlers and weightlifters. And that’s what saved my life. Weinberg, the wrestling coach, and Romano, the weightlifter, held them off at the door and gave us time to escape. They were both killed.
“You know,” he said, “it was risky coming here into West Germany. The country is filled with little cell groups of Arab terrorist organizations. It was pointed out to the German authorities, but they chose to do nothing about it.”
“What can you do now?” I asked him.
“One of the things is counter-measures of the same nature,” he said. “Every country has hot-headed young men just waiting to be turned loose. Israel is no exception.”
The actual revenge operation was carried out by loosely defined Mossad hit teams — not Yuval Aviv, the fraudulent operative who fooled Spielberg and his crew. But it was the underlings who were slain, not Abu Daoud, who planned the Munich killings. In 1999 he wrote a book called Palestine: From Jerusalem to Munich, which detailed the operation and won him 10,000 French francs and the Palestine Prize for Culture. Three years later the book was translated from French to English under the title, Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist.
Arafat, who authorized the operation, sending Daoud off with the words, “Allah be with you,” was awarded one third of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Six years later his official newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, urged Arab nations to boycott the Olympic Games in Australia because a moment of silence had been planned in memory of the 11 slain Israelis.
As the day wore on, I kept returning to the site of the hostage operation and just before they were taken away by bus to the helicopters that would signal their ultimate death I saw a sight I will never forget. By some sort of unspoken communication, a gathering of some of the world’s great Jewish athletes had formed outside the ropes. I recognized Abby Hoffman, the women’s 800-meter champion of Canada, and Irena Szewinska, formerly Irena Kirszenstein, the great Polish Olympic sprint champion, and a few others. They stood in a group, silent, watching, held together in some sort of speechless bond.
At 11 o’clock that night, Conrad Ahlers, a government spokesman, said all the hostages were liberated. It went out on the wires. I was downtown, accompanied by a German newsman I knew who acted as translator. I wanted to find out how the people of Munich felt about what was happening at their Olympics. Basically indifferent, except for a few hours later, when the news of the deaths became official. Then there was resentment and a strong concern for all the deutschmarks the country stood to lose if the Olympics were canceled.
“Our mistake was having the Israelis and the Arabs both in the Olympics,” was an opinion I heard more than once. “We should have kept them both out.”
“So soon?” said Nissim Kivity, a London-based Israeli journalist when I mentioned it to him the next day. “I thought that kind of thinking wouldn’t come for at least a week.”
I had been working round the clock. On the morning of the 6th, I was battling waves of fatigue, but the news I heard brought some life to my step. The New York Times had decided to roll in the heavy artillery. David Binder, the head of their Bonn Bureau, and Flora Lewis, one of their leading op-ed columnists, had been called in to firm up their coverage. The village was accessible on that Wednesday. I had morning appointments set up with a couple more Israeli athletes. I was walking down the main street when I got the feeling I was being followed. Sure enough … red face, dark business suit … I recognized Binder. And the woman with him had to be Flora Lewis. I picked up the pace, entered the jewelry store that had been popular with the athletes, walked through it quickly and out the back door. “Two-dooring,” we used to call it when I was in school. And proceeded to my interviews. It was one of the few uppers during a dismal period.
The official mourning ceremony was awful and it finally convinced me that I just couldn’t stay there anymore. The older Israeli officials sat in the front row, their faces twisted in grief. How many times before? And over the amplifiers came the booming voice of Brundage, offering a final touch of inhumanity.
“Two savage attacks!” he said, lumping the 11 deaths with his own personal demon, the ouster of Rhodesia. “It was the first time in 20 years that the Committee has gone against me,” he had said, his voice shaking with rage, when he first heard that the IOC had voted Rhodesia out. And in the face of a far greater tragedy, he still couldn’t let g
o of it.
Some nations chose to respect Israel’s sorrow. Some did not. After the mourning ceremony, I ran into Clifford Buck, the head of the American Olympic Committee. I asked him how he felt about what had happened.
“Wait till I’ve had my lunch first,” he said.
“We didn’t send any flowers, we didn’t stop our practices for a minute of silent prayer,” said Rod Milburn, an American gold medalist in the high hurdles. “Officially, we didn’t do a thing.”
The Russians, naturally, ducked the mourning ceremony. It made no sense to alienate the Arab nations, with whom the Soviets did business. “I believe we had our International Olympic Committee member at the ceremony,” said Idar Valiachmetiv, the Soviet press chief, although he wasn’t sure. The Russian athletes spent most of the day sunbathing and horsing around in front of their dorm. When the ceremony was ending, a group of them passed by, raucous, noisy, on their way to soccer practice.
Now in two days I’m supposed to go out and cover Russia vs. USA in basketball and sit down and write hard copy about the Soviet zone defense, I was thinking. Sorry, I can’t do it.
At nine o’clock that night, after the ceremony, 70,000 fans, equipped with noisemakers and flags, filled the stadium to watch Hungary play Germany in soccer. A banner was hung in the stands: 17 DEAD, ALREADY FORGOTTEN? Security forces took down the sign. The offenders were expelled.
The games would go on, but not every heart was in them. Wilma Van Gool, a Dutch sprinter, had developed a friendship with Israeli sprinter and hurdler Esther Roth-Shahamorov, whose coach had been killed. The Israeli athletes were no longer competing. Van Gool dropped out of the semifinals of the 200 meters. She said she just couldn’t compete any more. I heard other isolated stories. The Norwegian team handball contingent said they couldn’t continue. The Handball Federation informed them that if they dropped out they would be expelled from the federation. So they competed.
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