Signed: BLACK SEPTEMBER.
8 BUNGLED NEGOTIATIONS
MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE, 31 CONNOLLYSTRASSE TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1972, 0840H
The 0900 deadline was impossible to meet. The West German and Bavarian officials gathered in the basement of the G-1 administration building in the Olympic Village were ill equipped to deal with a hostage situation. They had neither the time nor the know-how to craft an effective plan. The only task they addressed was forestalling the deadline. A Bavarian policewoman named Analiese Graes, who had volunteered to serve as an intermediary between Issa, the German-speaking terrorist leader, and the German officials, arranged a meeting outside Apartment 1.
At 0845 hours, Manfred Schreiber, the Munich police chief; Walter Troeger, the mayor of the Olympic Village; and Ahmed Damardash Touni, the Egyptian delegate to the International Olympic Committee, made their way up Connollystrasse to meet with Issa. A terrorist with a ski mask over his face and a Kalashnikov in his hand stood by the second-floor window and watched the German officials approach. Issa, in a cream-colored suit and an oversized white hat, immediately stepped out of the building to greet them. It was to be the first of many meetings.
Schreiber was impressed by Issa’s composure and his fluent German. “He expressed his demands succinctly, forcefully, calmly, and tirelessly,” he later said. Issa never showed his eyes. He was polite and, at times, friendly with the German officials, but behind his dark sunglasses, the wiry, chain-smoking terrorist clearly controlled the situation. He clutched a grenade in his hand at all times, ready to release the pin and kill them all at the first sign of trickery.
Troeger and Schreiber had no protocols to work from and no clue how to neutralize the situation. Touni, a native Arabic speaker, was asked to negotiate with Issa in the comfort of his mother tongue. He assured Issa that German and Israeli officials in Bonn and Jerusalem were looking into his demands, but they needed more time to process “the details.” Issa immediately extended the deadline till noon.
Schreiber, a veteran police officer used to dealing with an array of criminals, considered grabbing Issa and using him as a bargaining chip. Issa caught his roaming eyes. Lifting the grenade, he said, “If you lay your hand on me, I’ll blow us both to bits.” A move like the one Schreiber considered might have worked against a group of criminals committed to cash rather than a cause. But the Palestinians in Apartment 1 were devoted to an idea, not to one another. They would never have negotiated for Issa’s life. After all, it was he, in the train station, who had told them they were all martyrs for the Palestinian cause. And with him gone, they would have become more volatile, unpredictable, and difficult to deal with.
Throughout the hostage crisis the negotiating team showed their ignorance of the goals of ideological terrorists. Schreiber offered Issa “an unlimited amount of money” in exchange for the Israeli hostages. He suggested they set the sum. “This is not about money,” Issa replied with disgust. “Talk of money is demeaning.”
Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the portly, jowly West German interior minister, also failed to grasp the essence of the terrorists’ mission. “When it became clear to me that the negotiations were off course I said to the leader: ‘You know our history, you know what the Third Reich did to the Jews . . . . You need to understand that that can’t happen in Germany again.’ I told him to take me instead of them.” Genscher’s pleas fell on deaf ears.
At 1045 hours, Genscher, Merck, and Schreiber established an official crisis committee. The Federal Republic of Germany had no hostage negotiation team, and the men seemed lost, adrift, lacking in ideas, yet unwilling to accept advice. Ulrich Wagner, an eyewitness to the hostage crisis and an aide-de-camp to Genscher, later said, diplomatically, “At this time, we were, I think, a little bit naïve.” Weeks after the crisis, the federal government chose Wagner to establish and command the GSG-9 anti-terror unit—an outright result of that naïveté.
Black September stood firm; for them there was no way back. The terrorists were willing to become shuhada, martyrs; in fact, it was an integral part of their plan. Troeger, who spoke with Issa at length, relayed his sentiment: “Either way we are dead. Either we will be killed here, or if we go out and give up without having hostages . . . we will be killed where we go.”
Troeger likened Issa and his men to the Japanese kamikazes of World War II. In the early 1970s, words like “martyr” were rarely heard in Europe and America. Suicidal terrorists weren’t commonplace. But the death-by-martyrdom notion was well entrenched in the Arab Muslim culture to which the terrorists belonged. Despite the fact that the armed Palestinian resistance was, at the time, secular and, to a large degree, under the spell of Marxist ideology, the Black September terrorists were devotedly suicidal.
The West German, Bavarian, and Olympic authorities had one goal: to remove this stain from their event as soon as possible and resume the Games. But as noon approached, the West German negotiating team was no closer to a solution than they had been six hours before. The Palestinian terrorists would not bend: they wanted prisoners released before they would begin to discuss freeing the hostages. The Israelis, led by Prime Minister Golda Meir, refused to bow to extortion. The negotiations, as an end in themselves, were futile.
The Germans also had to address Israel’s demands that the Games be halted until the end of the crisis. The West German authorities refused. The main events would go on. And so, as nine Israeli athletes sat in their Olympic dorm, hands and feet bound, thirsty, hungry, frightened, and sweaty, their friend’s body in a pool of his own dark blood, a host of assault rifles in their faces, three thousand fans gathered to watch Japan’s skilled volleyball team drub West Germany.
Neither the Olympic organizers nor the German officials thought this strange. Eventually, once Israeli pressure turned international, the IOC and the German authorities agreed to halt the Games briefly at 1530 hours and to hold a memorial ceremony for the two fallen athletes at ten the following morning. They had no way of knowing that the memorial would take place as planned, but for many more than two.
9 GOLDA BLANCHES
ISRAEL, LOD INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, VIP ROOM TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1972, 1430H
Victor Cohen called his wife and asked her to pack him an overnight bag. Cohen, head of interrogations at the Shabak, had spun a web of hope around the Sabena hijackers four months before. Minutes earlier Yosef Harmelin, the widely respected head of Shabak, had called him. “Get to Lod Airport immediately,” Harmelin said. Cohen understood—he was to fly to Munich to negotiate with the terrorists who had taken the Israeli athletes hostage earlier that morning.
When Cohen, a stout man with quick eyes, walked into the packed, smoked-filled airport VIP room, he saw Defense Minister Dayan, Mossad chief Zvi Zamir, and his boss, Harmelin, conversing in a corner. He was taken aside and told that the prime minister had decided to send Dayan and Zamir to Germany. Dayan, he was told, insisted that Cohen accompany them.
At 0530 hours Prime Minister Golda Meir had been awakened with news of the attack in Munich. At first, her military aide, Brigadier General Yisrael Lior, was unable to sketch a clear picture of the events, but by nine, when an emergency meeting of the defense cabinet was set to begin, certain facts had been established: Moshe Weinberg, the wrestling coach, had been killed; nine or ten Israeli athletes were being held at gunpoint in their apartment complex in the Olympic Village; Fatah’s Black September group was responsible; the terrorists demanded that Israel release over two hundred prisoners.
At the close of the meeting Meir and her cabinet decided that the Israeli ambassador to West Germany, Eliashiv Ben-Horin, would present the following principles to the West German authorities:
1. The Israeli government does not bargain with terrorists. The responsibility of handling the crisis falls on West Germany. The Israeli government expects the West German government to do all in its power to secure the release of the hostages.
2. Israel will understand if the terrorists are promised freedo
m, so long as it helps liberate the hostages.
3. Israel hereby pledges its trust in West Germany and is certain that the government will do all in its power to ensure the safety of all the hostages.
Ben-Horin arrived at the Olympic Village at 1100 hours under direct orders from Jerusalem. He was the first official Israeli representative to meet with the negotiating team. He immediately relayed the cabinet’s position, emphasizing Israel’s absolute refusal to release terrorists from its jails. Ben-Horin kept the diplomatic channels open for both formal and informal messages.
The talks with West Germany were burdened by the stress of the present and the oppressive weight of the past. Since early morning, Meir, German chancellor Willy Brandt, and Interior Minister Genscher had held a drawn-out and unproductive dialogue over the phone. Chancellor Brandt and Genscher voiced their disgust at the attack and expressed condolences over the death of Weinberg. They had little else to offer. Meir, for her part, clarified her position—that the West German government was responsible. Brandt and Genscher did not dispute that, or ask for greater flexibility on the part of the “Old Lady” regarding the terrorists’ demands. They did, however, politely refuse the prime minister’s offer to send a team of commandos to Munich.
Brandt’s and Genscher’s hands were tied by German federal law. Israeli officials were unaware that the German constitution did not give the federal government authority to move so much as one soldier into the Bavarian state. Constitutionally, all matters concerning the resolution of the developing international crisis were in the hands of the Bavarians, sole sovereigns of the Olympic Village. Brandt’s and Genscher’s degree of influence was tied to the Bavarians’ willingness to heed their advice. However, any intervention, foreign or federal, was deeply resented by the Bavarian authorities.
The German reputation for precision, efficiency, and order inspired confidence in the Israeli leaders. Dayan and Zamir were certain that the West German security forces would stage a well-designed rescue. They didn’t realize that the Federal Republic of Germany lacked an anti-terror unit, and that, even had such a unit existed, it would not have been able to act in Munich. No one in Israel thought to check these facts.
At 1450 hours Golda Meir stood before Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in a two-piece Terylene suit, her gray-streaked hair pulled back in a bun, and announced that Israel “expects that the Federal Republic of Germany and the International Olympic Committee will do all in their power to free the Israeli citizens from the hands of the murderers. It is unfeasible that the Olympic Games will continue as though nothing has happened while our citizens are under the threat of death at the Olympic Village.”
Prime Minister Meir and the top officials of Israel’s security forces concluded the emergency meeting by deciding to leave the rescue mission in German hands. In an interview fifteen years after the massacre, Zamir said, “There was a bad feeling about whether the Germans could really be trusted. Could we remain uninvolved when questions of what, how, and why arose?”
Moshe Dayan, who held enormous sway with the prime minister, pushed for Israeli abstention from the hostage crisis. Other officials urged Dayan to fly to Munich, as head of the defense establishment and the Israeli with the greatest influence abroad.
Victor Cohen arrived at the airport ten minutes after Dayan. Cohen disagreed with the decision to send Dayan. He approached the legendary general, who was talking with Zamir and Harmelin, and said, “Listen, the hostage situation is playing out in front of the world. If you show up there, the media will recognize you, the terrorists will hear about your arrival, and then they’ll understand how major this crisis is for Israel, and that doesn’t help us at all. It will only make them raise their price and maybe rattle them enough to harm more hostages. You should stay in Israel.”
The room fell silent as all heads turned to Cohen. Dayan’s decisions were not often questioned in public. Dayan nodded. “You’re right, Victor. You and Zamir should go. I’ll notify Golda.”
A few hours later Cohen and Zamir boarded a rented plane for the three-and-a-half-hour flight to Munich. They touched down at Munich International Airport as the last flicker of twilight played on the plane’s metallic wings. A secret service car took them straight to the Olympic Village.
Concurrently, Golda Meir spoke to a reporter in her office. Why wasn’t Israel willing to bargain with the terrorists? the reporter asked. “If we should give in,” she replied, “then no Israeli anywhere in the world will feel that his life is safe.” After a few beats of introspection, she added, “It’s blackmail of the worst kind.”
10 IN THE HOSTAGES’ ROOM
MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE, 31 CONNOLLYSTRASSE, APARTMENT 1 TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1972, 1705H
Issa agreed to extend the deadline three times. First, under pressure from Schreiber, Troeger, and Touni, he gave them one hour. Merck and Genscher were then able to squeeze two more delays of two hours each, making the new deadline at 1700 hours. The Germans explained that the postponements were merely bureaucratic: the Israelis had not yet been able to locate all 234 prisoners; there were difficulties obtaining the approval of one minister; Tel Aviv traffic is stifling. Their excuses, some plausible, some less so, were meant to give the impression that negotiations were progressing, strings were being pulled, prison doors were sliding open on well-oiled tracks. The end of the crisis was near—a bit more patience and the terrorists would be parading through the joy-filled streets of Beirut, held aloft by a throng of supporters.
With each delay, Issa became more impatient and volatile. When the third extension was requested he threatened to execute two of the Israeli hostages. He vowed to drag the athletes to the doorway and shoot them in front of the cameras. Across the globe a billion viewers were glued to their televisions, watching the crisis unfold in real time. Tension peaked in the minutes leading up to each of Issa’s deadlines. In those nerve-racking moments, the German negotiation team would walk to the entrance of 31 Connollystrasse. Issa would huddle with the group. The viewers could see but not hear. The conversation over, the Germans would move slowly away from the building. The world held its breath waiting for the TV announcer to broadcast the verdict from the West German officials. With the approach of each deadline the athletes’ families watched helplessly as the delegation’s fate was discussed.
As the crisis on Connollystrasse boiled and simmered, athletes in the village soaked up the sun. Two hundred yards from the Israeli delegation’s building, sunbathers lay on the banks of an artificial pond. The Olympians chatted about the competition and exchanged training techniques, while just two minutes away their fellow competitors were being held at gunpoint, their lives in peril.
The scene at the village was surreal. The Munich police estimated that seventy thousand spectators, alongside thousands of reporters, television crews, and photographers with long-range lenses, tried to get close to the action. Athletes and troops shared the same ground, the former chatting and staying loose, wary of taking their minds off the prize of Olympic competition; the Olys, police, and soldiers stood by armored personnel carriers, focused on the looming possibility of a gunfight.
At 1635 hours, close to twelve hours of static negotiations ended when the gloomy German officials presented themselves at the blue door. Their strategy was leading to a dead end, and they knew it. The Bavarian interior minister, Bruno Merck, spoke first, but with little success. The terrorists weren’t buying any more half-baked excuses. Issa then surprised the Germans with a new proposal. He demanded that a plane be ready and waiting on the runway within an hour. The terrorists and their hostages would be flown to Cairo, where the negotiations could continue. The Israeli government would fly the released prisoners to Egypt, and the exchange would be made there. If this demand was not met, Issa assured them calmly, he would execute each and every one of the hostages.
Genscher, Schreiber, Troeger, and Merck backed away from the doorway to confer. They agreed that the plan was not viable. The sovereign nation of West
Germany could not allow the transfer to foreign soil—the kidnapping, actually—of international guests by a terrorist group. Yet Issa’s proposal also held considerable appeal. The shift of the crisis to an Arab country might save the Olympic Games: with the crisis two thousand miles away and far from the prying lenses of the media, the so-called Games of Peace and Joy could go on.
The crisis committee wanted to buy time to see if the plan was in any way workable. Genscher asked to speak to the hostages. Issa hesitated for a minute and then shouted to Tony in Arabic on the second floor. The curtains at the second-floor window were opened and fencing coach Andrei Spitzer appeared in his undershirt. His hands were tied, his hair plastered to his sweaty forehead. “Is everybody okay?” Genscher asked. “What is the situation with all the other hostages?”
Spitzer managed to reply, “Everybody is okay except for one—” before he was hit in the back of his head with the butt of an AK-47 and dragged away from the window. This implausible encounter, captured by the cameras, was the last time Spitzer was publicly seen alive.
Genscher insisted that Issa let him into the hostage room. He wanted to see the athletes with his own eyes. If they were willing to fly to Cairo, West Germany would arrange the transfer. Issa was feeling the pressure: he and his squad had been on their feet for at least twenty-four hours. They had been holding the hostages captive for twelve. He knew their lack of sleep could compromise the mission; he feared losing the ability to make sharp decisions. The negotiations were going in circles. Egypt had friendly relations with Fatah; they would be welcomed there. Issa understood that the longer they stayed in the Olympic Village, the more vulnerable they became. He assumed that the Germans were just waiting for the right moment to pounce. The move to an Arab country, which first came up as a possibility during the planning stages of the operation, now seemed a brilliant option. And if Cairo should reject the planes, they would simply fly on to Morocco.
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response Page 5
