The German government instituted a red-tape jungle of bureaucracy, shuffling requests from one office to another without providing any answers. After several years, the Germans claimed that they did not have any evidence from the crime scene. This made Ankie Spitzer suspicious: it did not seem possible that such a ghastly and public tragedy would go uninvestigated. A proud and graceful woman who speaks Dutch, German, English, French, and Hebrew fluently, Spitzer refused to accept Germany’s excuses. She demanded to know what really happened in Munich on every commemoration day, in each public forum, in the pages of all the newspapers.
For more than thirty years, Ankie Spitzer and Ilana Romano, widow of Yossef Romano, have been representing the interests of the bereaved families. The two women have met with almost every high-ranking German official who has visited Israel since 1972. In these brief meetings, grudgingly agreed to by the Germans, Spitzer and Romano requested the release of all the documents pertaining to the Munich Massacre. For over two decades promises were made and then broken by the German politicians. The reports never arrived.
The German authorities hoped that the Israeli families’ resolve would weaken, but the two widows did not relent. Sparks of hope were lit and then left to flicker. The Germans did not intend to release any information on the subject. They certainly were not going to accept any responsibility or apologize for the massacre on their soil.
The greatest disappointment came in 1976, when Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister of Germany at the time of the massacre, came to Israel on an official visit as Germany’s foreign minister. Genscher had remarked that the day he walked into the hostages’ room in Apartment 1, saw the dead man splayed on the floor, the blood in a puddle by his feet, and the terrified look on the hostages’ faces, was the worst of his life. Yet he refused to meet the representatives of the families. Only Ankie Spitzer’s desperate threat to prevent his plane from taking off convinced his assistant to schedule a meeting with Spitzer and Ilana Romano at the West German embassy in Tel Aviv. Their meeting began at six in the morning and lasted fifteen minutes.
Genscher sat silently through Spitzer and Romano’s presentation. They requested that all previously withheld information about the event be released. They asked that West German authorities draft a compensation plan for the surviving families, and build a memorial for the victims. Genscher listened stone-faced. He said he would reply to their requests in writing. His answer arrived at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem ten months later.
The official letter was so inadequate, it was disrespectful. Genscher denied government possession of documents relating to the Munich Massacre. As for compensation, Genscher wrote that the West German government was prepared to grant scholarships to two of the children of the victims for one year of study in West Germany. The scholarships, according to Genscher, would only be given to children who could prove financial need. The letter did not address Spitzer and Romano’s request for a memorial. The compensation plan did not even attempt to meet the needs of the thirty-four widows, fatherless children, and bereaved parents whose lives were devastated by the massacre. The families refused to accept the inadequate offer, and resolved to continue their fight for information.
Spitzer and Romano did not receive a significantly greater degree of assistance from the Israeli government. Though the eleven murdered athletes and coaches had been sent to Munich to represent the state, Israel offered neither political nor financial help to the families. Left alone to deal with the implacable German federal authorities, Spitzer and Romano were forced to manage an international dialogue from their homes, rather than through proper diplomatic channels. There is no clear explanation for Israel’s official policy—their unwillingness to pursue the truth of that night.
A conflict of interest may explain their reluctance. In the 1970s, security ties between Israel and West Germany were greatly expanded, and West German intelligence agencies worked closely with their Israeli peers. Joint secret missions and intelligence exchanges were carried out on a regular basis. Sayeret Matkal and the Yamam, Israel’s two leading counterterror units, assisted the West German government in establishing the German GSG-9 counterterror unit, under the command of General Ulrich Wagner.
Twenty years of deadlock came to an end in the spring of 1992. Several weeks before the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, Ankie Spitzer made an emotional appeal to German viewers in an interview on ZDF television. She spoke of her fruitless quest to discover the truth about the Munich Massacre and her husband’s death. She reiterated her refusal to accept German claims that there were no documents from that night. Spitzer stole viewers’ hearts with her powerful message, delivered in German.
Two weeks later, she received a call from an unidentified German government official. “There is information, you’re absolutely right,” he said. “I have access to the information.” Spitzer had been plagued for years by crank callers pushing conspiracy theories and false information. She dismissed the man as another such and directed him to Pinchas Zeltzer, the Israeli lawyer representing the victims’ families. Zeltzer, however, took the caller seriously. The German government worker told the lawyer he had access to documents. He offered to send a sample of the papers. “I’ve been waiting for this material for twenty years,” Zeltzer told him. “Send everything you can.” Zeltzer promised to keep his source confidential, come what may.
A messenger arrived at Zeltzer’s office door two weeks later holding a brown envelope with original documents from the West German investigation of the massacre. There were thirty pages of autopsy logs for Andrei Spitzer, David Berger, and Yossef Gutfreund. There were ballistic reports on almost all the eleven victims. In total, there were eighty original typewritten pages collected from different dockets, suggesting a wealth of documents amassed by the German authorities in the aftermath of the massacre. They had been stored in the Bavarian archives for twenty years, hidden from the eyes of the public.
Ankie Spitzer was elated. After two decades of battling the German authorities, she finally had access to the truth. She was closer than ever to being able to reconstruct the final hours of her husband’s life.
Once the authenticity of the documents had been verified, Spitzer demanded that the federal government provide her with full access to the archive. The government refused. After several TV appearances, a political storm erupted in Germany. During one dramatic debate, Spitzer, speaking live from Tel Aviv, confronted the Bavarian justice minister, who denied the existence of any official archives; Spitzer produced a sheaf of papers and began quoting from the official ballistic reports.
The German opposition party demanded the release of the information. The interior minister of Germany and the Bavarian justice minister were in the hot seat, trying to cover up two decades of dishonesty.
On August 29, 1992, Zeltzer received notice from Munich: “We found the documents. You can come to Munich with a local lawyer and collect everything we have.”
The next day Zeltzer flew to the Bavarian capital to scour the municipal archives. In the basement of the archives building, twenty boxes and crates stuffed with dusty files were presented to him. There were 3,808 files holding tens of thousands of documents. There were hundreds of investigative reports, dozens of eyewitness accounts from everyone who had participated in the rescue mission, and nine hundred invaluable photographs, mostly taken after the massacre. It was an incredible collection of material, carefully detailing the events of September 5, 1972, allowing the families to finally learn the truth about how their loved ones had died.
The material also enabled the families to file a legal claim for compensation. In 1972, when the struggle with the German authorities began, there were thirty-four parents, widows, and children involved. By the time the case was brought to court in the mid-1990s, only twenty-five remained alive. The case against the federal government, the Bavarian government, and the municipality of Munich was brought to court in 1994. After years of exhausting legal negotiations in the Bavarian
court system, a deal was offered to the families. “If you continue in the courts we will no longer speak with you,” top officials in Berlin said to Ankie Spitzer in 2003. The Germans offered a settlement of 3 million euros, to be divided among the twenty-five complainants, which came to $115,000 per person.
The families held a tempestuous meeting in Tel Aviv in 2004. Two alternatives were presented. The first: accept the financial offer and forgo the opportunity of forcing the German federal government, the Bavarian state government, and the Munich municipal government to be held accountable for their actions. The second: refuse the offer and continue the indefinite legal battle for at least eight more years.
After long deliberations, the families decided to accept the German offer. Only Ankie Spitzer wanted to keep fighting. “I was disappointed by the decision but I understood the circumstances which led to the vote going the way it did. It wasn’t money that mattered. The lawsuit for monetary compensation, from my point of view, was the only way to force the Germans to deal with and to reveal what had happened, to take responsibility and to announce their guilt and even, maybe, to request to be forgiven. After more than thirty years, we managed to make them bend. Even if they didn’t directly state their guilt, they understood that they were responsible.”
15 TOUGH DECISIONS
TEL AVIV, MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1972, 1000H
The “Voice of Israel,” the country’s public radio station, began its top-of-the-hour news broadcast with a series of high-pitched, solemn tones. The headlines followed. On Thursday, September 7, at ten in the morning, the lead news item detailed the burial times for ten of the victims of the massacre.
An El Al Boeing 707 carrying ten coffins was due to land at Lod Airport at 1145 hours. Israel had withdrawn from the Games and the surviving Israeli athletes and delegation members were on board as well, accompanying their slain colleagues. Funerals would take place immediately following a brief military ceremony at the airport. The eleventh victim, weight lifter David Berger, had been flown from Germany earlier that day. President Richard Nixon had sent an American air force plane to bring the athlete’s body back to his hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio.
The Israeli government declared September 7 an official day of mourning. The nation was traumatized. Flags were lowered to half-mast; stores, restaurants, and government offices were closed. People clustered in the streets, reading the papers in groups, learning the anatomy of the tragedy.
The Munich attack was unlike anything the young country had weathered. It was a dividing line, separating history into “before Munich” and “after Munich.” Israel had known trying hours before, but Munich cut through all its defensive layers of scar tissue and sinew. Jews had been led yet again to their death on German soil. Images of the athletes, Israel’s finest, bound, unable to resist their impending death, tore deeply into the nation’s psyche. A feeling of helplessness prevailed. Only twenty-seven years had passed since six million Jews had been herded into camps and murdered. Now, the wounds of the Holocaust bled again.
The Mossad department responsible for gathering operational intelligence on terrorist organizations was humming with frenetic activity. An emergency draft had quadrupled their workforce overnight. New recruits, who had passed the rigorous entrance exams two months earlier but had yet to begin the case officers course, were called in to assist the department’s five permanent staffers.
The Mossad staff officers crammed into three small rooms. Their task was to review every personnel file, to reread every piece of data, to find threads and expose connections that would lead them to the identities of the planners and perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. They needed to understand and unmask Black September, and identify its links to Fatah and the PLO.
Over the ensuing weeks and months they would sift through tens of thousands of raw intelligence reports. Mossad personnel stayed up late and worked weekends. Emotions ran high; commitment was total: everyone knew the significance of the quest.
Failure, frustration, and shock were written across Zvi Zamir’s face that morning as he made his way to his tenth-floor office. Three floors below, at the Tzomet (Crossroads) wing of the Mossad, the feeling was equally dour. Tzomet case officers (katsas), operating from Europe, drafted and ran Arab agents that were either part of, or subsequently inserted into, the military, political, and economic spheres of all Arab countries. This human intelligence—HUMINT—was, in the 1970s, Israel’s primary means of discovering the intentions and capabilities of its enemies. But the focus had been on Syria and Egypt—Israel’s neighbors to the north and south—where the threat of war loomed. Terrorist organizations were a bit neglected.
Nonetheless, for the past forty-eight hours Tzomet staff officers had been grappling with a frustrating and demanding question: How did we not sound the bell? How did we not learn of the plan? How did we so utterly fail to pick up a single bit of intelligence about this attack, which must have required a considerable time to plan, and certainly included a few dozen people? One day earlier, just twenty-four hours after the hostage situation came to its tragic end, Zamir had commissioned an internal investigative team to examine the Mossad intelligence failure. It was already clear that no one in the Israeli intelligence community had so much as one quality HUMINT source in Black September or the group surrounding Abu-Iyad or Ali Hassan Salameh at the upper echelons of Fatah.
All Palestinian terrorist organizations raised their level of alertness. They were poised for the scripted retaliatory air strikes that generally followed a major attack. This time, even the Syrian and Lebanese armed forces began preparing for bombardment. Radio communication signals from Palestinian bases called for a mass exodus of operatives.
The wait lasted just over forty-eight hours. At 1550 hours, on Friday, September 8, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, two dozen fighter jets from the Ramat David base in northern Israel struck deep in Lebanese and Syrian territory. It was the IDF’s most devastating attack in two years—air force planes bombed eleven Palestinian bases, including one just five miles from Damascus, killing two hundred terrorists and eleven Lebanese civilians. Hundreds more, both terrorist and civilian, were injured. But the dead and injured had no connection with Black September or the massacre in Munich.
At a press conference that day, IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar was asked whether the air strikes were an Israeli response to Munich.
“No,” he said. “Can there be a response to what happened in Munich?”
The strikes, he continued, “were part of the war we are forced to wage against the terrorists so long as they continue to kill Israelis.” When asked whether Black September had been hit, he said: “Black September is part of Fatah. We don’t concern ourselves with whether or not the members of this wing are present in Syria or Lebanon. There are terrorist organizations operating from there and they have declared war on us. We must strike back.”
Coverage of the Israeli strikes in the daily papers was adulatory. “The Air Force gave a 21-gun salute to the athletes, who were not honored with a military funeral,” one columnist exclaimed.
Days later, IDF forces raided terrorist bases in south Lebanon: 1,350 infantrymen, forty-five tanks, and 133 armored personnel carriers, together with four artillery units and several fighter planes, took part in the mission—“Turmoil 4.” One hundred fifty tons of bombs were dropped over a period of forty-two hours. Scores of villages and towns in south Lebanon, fast becoming home to terrorists expelled from Jordan, were searched. The IDF spokesman’s office reported forty-five terrorists killed, sixteen Palestinian operatives captured, and hundreds of houses damaged or destroyed.
None of those killed or captured had any covert or operational affiliation with Black September. As destructive as these missions were, cabinet ministers and IDF brass knew it was not nearly enough to placate Israeli public opinion: the nation demanded a more significant form of retribution.
The public had no knowledge of a top secret meeting convened by the pr
ime minister days earlier. On Wednesday, September 6, one hour after Zamir’s return from Munich, Prime Minister Golda Meir summoned her cabinet members, among them Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Deputy Prime Minister and Education, Culture and Sports Minister Yigal Allon to Jerusalem. They listened as Zamir, in dry but forceful words, recounted the horror of the murders he had just witnessed. The ministers were livid. A response was necessary. But many were frustrated: Who will we retaliate against? Who will we hit? Who are the commanding officers of the Black September group? Do they even have bases?
By the meeting’s end they had decided on the air strikes and the subsequent ground assault, but all present recognized the need to go beyond the standard retaliatory script. The look of stern resolve on the Old Lady’s face told them that she was prepared to take the difficult steps necessary. She wanted to set a new standard. She realized Israel could no longer afford to respond and retaliate. The Talmudic imperative to “rise and slay the one who comes to kill you” needed to be fulfilled to the letter of the law. A new Israeli response was needed, one that would imprint itself on the minds of conspirators everywhere, and be remembered by the free world.
16 GOLDA GOES FOR REVENGE
TEL AVIV, BRANCH 4, MILITARY INTELLIGENCE HQ TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1972, 2110H
Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Mor walked into one of Branch 4’s two wooden shacks and shot a quick glance at the office’s latest technological wonder: a twenty-one-inch black-and-white television. “What’s on now?” he asked. Without turning from the monitor, Lieutenant Alik Rubin, a fluent Arabic speaker, said, “It’s the Lebanese evening news. They’re showing the Black September funerals, again. They were buried in the afternoon but they’ve been showing it in loops for hours. It’s getting everyone all riled up.”
Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response Page 8
