Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response

by Klein, Aaron J.

  Abu-Yussef and Adwan were tied to terrorist operations against Israel since 1968. Several loose, uncorroborated strands of information even linked the two of them with Black September and the Munich attack. Undoubtedly, both were up to their necks in terrorist activity. Their planned assassination was mostly preventive in nature. The necessity and legitimacy of targeting the third man, Kamal Nasser, the spokesman, was debated for weeks. In the end, he was sentenced to death because Military Intelligence considered him an ideologue who sanctified and promoted the killing of innocent Israelis—and because the PLO lacked a clear distinction between its political and operational branches. According to Military Intelligence, the PLO’s political activists, primarily in Europe, assisted terror attacks. They were legitimate targets.

  Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak, future prime minister of Israel, commander of Sayeret Matkal at the time, led his men toward their targets in West Beirut. Over the past two years, he had been pushing the brass for more counterterrorism operations. The different elite forces of the IDF were all steeped in an unspoken yet competitive race to see who could pull off the most daring operation. This one began on a small pad of paper. Barak heard rumors in early 1973 that the IDF’s Joint Chiefs were considering a mission deep in Beirut. He sent Major Biran to find out more. Biran poked around his contacts at the Mossad and learned that the brass was looking to locate several top-level Fatah targets in the Lebanese capital. A Mossad officer ripped a piece of paper out of a notepad and sketched the location of the homes of Abu-Yussef, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser. For Sayeret Matkal, known in Israel simply as the Unit, that was how the mission began.

  In early February, Barak called his senior officers to a meeting. Yoni Netanyahu, older brother to future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and deputy commander of the Unit at the time, sat next to Major Muki Betzer, Major Biran, and Lieutenant Amitai Nachmani. The five of them looked closely at the black and white photos of Abu-Yussef, Kamal Nasser, and Kamal Adwan. Major Biran recited the terrorist biographies of the three, as he had received them from above. He unfurled an aerial map of Beirut. “Here,” he said, pointing to the a-Sir neighborhood, “on Vardun Street, just beyond the American and British embassies and the luxury seaside hotels, in these two tall buildings.” Everyone clustered around the map. There wasn’t much to say. A lot of intelligence work had to be done before they could start on an operational plan.

  Since the “Black September” of 1970, when Jordan’s King Hussein’s forces killed thousands of Palestinians and forced the survivors to flee, Beirut had become the home of many Palestinian terrorist organizations. Thousands of operatives from Fatah, and the left-wing organizations of George Habash, Naif Hawatmeh, and Ahmed Jibril, freely roamed the streets of the Lebanese capital. Neither their threat to Lebanese sovereignty nor the rule of law made much impression on them: weapons were slung casually over their shoulders. Outside their offices, where terrorist operations in Europe and Israel were planned, heavily fortified guard positions were set up, with machine guns and concrete blocks.

  The Palestinians were not Beirut’s only guests. The city had become a mecca of sorts for mostly left-wing international terror organizations. The West German Baader-Meinhof Gang, the Italian Red Brigades, the ASALA, and the Japanese Red Army all had scores of operatives in the city. They attended training camps and seminars. They were all part of a bizarre metropolis where bars and casinos stayed open all night, girls in bathing suits sunbathed on the beach, muezzins summoned the faithful to prayer five times a day, and terrorists gathered in alleyways.

  Beirut was a factory for terrorism. The Sabena, Lod, Bangkok, and Munich attacks had been planned and supervised from high-rise apartments in the high-income areas of the city. Organization heads wove intricate attack plans and did not hide their activities.

  Operation Spring of Youth began with Caesarea. The Mossad unit’s combatants went into the field early, undercover, to collect intelligence for the Unit. They photographed the apartment buildings, filmed the street at all hours of the day and night, checked the traffic routes to and from the buildings, and observed everyday life in the neighborhood. The hundreds of hours of surveillance work would hopefully translate into half an hour of meticulously executed action.

  The first question planners needed to answer: how to transport Barak’s troops to Beirut, a one-million-person coastal city seventy-five miles north of Israel’s border? Helicopters were ruled out almost immediately as too overt and dangerous. The sea proved a better option. Major Muki Betzer boarded an Israeli navy submarine to reconnoiter a five-mile stretch of beach along Beirut’s south shore.

  Biran pinpointed the beach of the Sands Hotel as a workable landing spot for the team. The benefit of landing on a private beach was obvious—no camping, no couples, and no fishermen. The downside was that the better rooms had balconies overlooking the sea. A late night cigarette on the balcony could lead to disaster. Caesarea’s combatants observed the beachfront hotel for many nights and found that the chilly March winds, carrying grains of salt and sand, kept the hotel guests inside at night. The balconies were empty, the blinds drawn. Biran knew he could proceed.

  The reports arrived in a steady stream. Caesarea’s undercover combatants learned the layout of the lobby, the design of the staircases, and the number of stairs on each landing. They checked the schedule of the concierge to see when he would likely be at his post. They reported back to Tel Aviv how many guards typically manned the front doors. Biran investigated the Beirut police: how many policemen were on night duty across the city, how many would respond to a call in that part of town, with how many vehicles, in what time frame, and with what degree of professionalism.

  The plan was remarkable. The chosen commandos would sail to Beirut on missile boats. Two miles offshore they would transfer to the naval commandos’ Mark 7 rubber rafts, which would silently slide onto the shore. Three Caesarea reserves officers, posing as Canadian and European tourists, would wait in large American cars in the hotel’s parking lot, their five-mile route committed to memory. “Our intention,” said Major Betzer, deputy commander of the mission, “was to finish the mission as quickly as possible and avoid a small war in the streets of Beirut.”

  Betzer had been carrying a small, passport-size picture in his shirt pocket for the two weeks prior to the mission. Biran had given him the photo. He studied the lean face of Abu-Yussef at every opportunity—when all hell broke loose in the apartment, amidst the screaming and the sting of sweat in his eyes, he would recognize his target immediately. Once he’d pulled the trigger he would have one more opportunity to verify his target: Abu-Yussef was missing the pinkie finger of his left hand. The others carried similar photos.

  The Unit’s top fifteen commandos were picked for the mission. A sixteenth, Yoni Netanyahu (who would be killed three years later leading the daring rescue mission at Entebbe), joined at the last minute. Their practice drills mirrored the real thing. They got into rubber boats, motored to shore, docked, piled into cars, sat in their exact positions, and drove for five miles. They unloaded at two high-rise buildings in north Tel Aviv. The neighborhood was still under construction and had been commandeered at night by the army under false pretenses. The warriors split into four teams. Three went up to their assigned apartments, and one, under the command of Barak, remained on the street as a forward command center. They practiced the quick entry steps into the lobby and then watched one another’s backs in a coordinated dancelike sprint up winding flights of stairs, guns aimed upwards, counting the floors as they climbed. Kamal Adwan lived on the second floor, Kamal Nasser on the third, and Abu-Yussef on the sixth floor of the neighboring building.

  Lieutenant General David Elazar, the IDF chief of staff, came to observe the team’s drills in north Tel Aviv. After watching a full rehearsal, he pulled Barak aside. “Look, Ehud,” he said, “it doesn’t look good. You guys will be tourists in civilian clothes, but all these men, at one-thirty in the morning? Their security guards are going to noti
ce you guys, it’s too suspicious . . . think of something else.”

  Barak, and Betzer, who was listening in, knew he was correct. It didn’t look right. Elazar leaned in and said, “What if some of you came dressed as women?” Betzer liked the idea immediately. He turned to Barak and said, “Yeah, Ehud, let’s dress up as couples. We’ll walk spread out in pairs.”

  Betzer set himself to the task. The shortest warriors would wear the drag. Barak would be the hot brunette, Lonny Rafael and Amiram Levine, a future IDF general and deputy head of the Mossad, would be blondes.

  The warriors carried all their weapons and explosives under their jackets and on their belts, or, in the case of the “ladies,” in their fashionable purses and under their brassieres. During another dry run, Muki Betzer, a broad-shouldered man in a suit two sizes too big for him, walked hand in hand with Barak, the brunette, to the entrance of the building. Afterward Lieutenant General Elazar approached Betzer and felt his jacket, asking, “What do you have on under here?”

  “Four grenades on my belt, an Ingram submachine gun under one arm, a Beretta under the other arm, and eight magazines, with thirty bullets each in these pockets,” Betzer replied, showing an array of tailored pockets sewn into his suit. Elazar nodded.

  Each warrior understood that if something went wrong with the plan, they were alone. No cavalry would come to Beirut. One night, after a long day of practice, Betzer gathered the three other men in his team. “We’re going on an unusual mission, in the heart of a bustling city. There’ll be guards at the doors to the place. The terrorists will be armed. There’ll be lots of unarmed civilians around us. What we need to focus on is Najar; he needs to pay for his sins.” Betzer paused. “If we do as we’ve planned, we’ll leave the city in one piece. It’s true, anything could happen, but we’ll stay calm, confident, and clearheaded. Each problem has a solution.” Finally, feeling he needed to hammer home the point of the mission, Betzer added: “This is the first time we are attacking an enemy with a name, not some unknown adversary with a weapon. As far as the state of Israel is concerned, these three guys have committed war crimes. This is revenge for Munich. We need them to feel our anger, and to fear us.”

  Three days before the mission began the entire Fatah leadership met in Kamal Nasser’s apartment. Abu-Iyad, who years later revealed the meeting, noticed that there was no security outside the apartments of Abu-Yussef, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser. “You guys aren’t cautious enough; an Israeli helicopter is going to land here someday soon and kidnap you,” he said. All of them laughed, except for the preternaturally suspicious Arafat, who told them to hire security guards immediately. The night before the mission began, Abu-Iyad, the architect of Munich, slept not for the first time on Kamal Nasser’s couch.

  Late Monday morning, April 9, the Unit’s sixteen warriors rolled up to the Haifa harbor on a bus packed with gear and weapons. IDF Chief of Staff Elazar and head of Military Intelligence Eli Zeira were waiting for them at the entrance to the harbor. They hopped on the bus and wished the fighters well. “All of a sudden I heard the Chief of Staff say ‘Kill the bastards,’” remembers Betzer. “None of us thought the terrorists would throw their hands in the air and surrender, but we practiced catching them, cuffing them, and transporting them to Israel. Deep down inside we knew that the chances of bringing them back as prisoners were slim and that in truth the brass didn’t really intend for us to do that, but the Chief of Staff’s utterance was more explicit than usual.”

  The plan had evolved. Sayeret Matkal was no longer acting alone in Beirut. Their target was still the primary objective, but it was not the only one. The Chief of Staff and other intelligence officers figured that they would get one chance to strike in the heart of Beirut before terror organizations fortified their positions, rendering Israeli counterterror raids too dangerous. Spring of Youth had to be a one-hit wonder. Additional forces, paratroopers and naval commandos, would strike other terrorist targets. The first paratrooper team, led by Lieutenant Colonel Amnon Shahak, the commander of Battalion 50 and later the IDF’s chief of staff and a government minister, was to strike a seven-story building in west Beirut, where dozens of terrorists from Naif Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) resided. The second additional target, a building in northern Lebanon, was suspected of serving as a demolitions factory, and was to be blown up by a paratrooper force under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Shmuel Firsburger. The final target, a suspected weapons factory, was to be detonated by Colonel Shaul Ziv, the commander of Shayetet 13, the naval commandos. Colonel Emanuel “Mano” Shaked, chief infantry and paratroops officer, was the commander of this part of the mission.

  Before the raid was set into motion, the chief of staff approached Mano and shook his hand. “You believe in God?” he asked.

  “That question pisses me off,” Mano responded.

  “Start praying anyway, because he’ll be the only one who can help you,” the chief of staff said, smiling. He winked and left.

  The sea was smooth as pool water on the afternoon the forces set sail. The missile boats motored west, toward Cyprus, and then casually slipped into the shipping lane between Cyprus and Beirut. Time crawled. At midnight each force disembarked at its destination. The team from Sayeret Matkal jumped into naval commando black rubber boats, wearing plastic ponchos over their wigs and jackets. Several hundred yards from the shore the naval commandos cut the engines and began to paddle. They moved fast, in unison, in silence. As they approached the Sands Hotel beach the commandos slipped over the side and helped the passengers ashore. They hit the beach with dry feet and dry wigs.

  Three rented Buick Skylarks waited in the parking lot. Mossad combatants, disguised as tourists, were at the wheel. All sixteen of the Unit’s men squeezed into the cars and set off. The man behind the wheel of the lead car told Barak and Betzer that shortly before he had noticed a pair of Lebanese policemen loitering around the target area. Barak did not outwardly respond, nor did he radio this significant development back to the command center on the missile boat, fearing they would order him to abort the mission. Had he tried, he would have quickly discovered he was unable to transmit. The army signals radio was damaged when the team jammed into the car. Major Biran would worry in silence.

  The cars joined Beirut’s smooth nighttime traffic. They covered five northbound miles on the turnpike in twenty uneventful minutes. Around the corner from Vardun Street they piled out. It was 0130. The Mossad combatants, many of whom held regular civilian jobs and simply made themselves available for “assignments,” drove down the street and parked, ready to assist at a moment’s notice. They got out of their cars and spoke quietly among themselves, casually leaning on the hood and chatting.

  Barak and Betzer led their team, walking arm in arm. Two policemen brushed past without giving them a second look. They split, each to his own target. The “brunette,” Barak, stayed downstairs with the “blonde,” Amiram Levine; the Unit’s doctor, Shmuel Katz; and one naval commando. Betzer led three warriors through the lobby and up the stairs at a silent gallop. They stopped on the sixth floor and stuck explosives beneath the knob of Abu-Yussef’s door. Betzer squeezed the rubber transmit button three times, signaling to Barak that he was ready to go. Each team would transmit an identical signal. When all were in place,

  Future Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in white jumpsuit, releasing hostages from Sabena Flight 571 at Lod Airport, May 1972. Photo courtesy GPO.

  A happy group photograph, taken just days before the Black September attack, of most of the members of the 1972 Israeli Olympic Squad.

  1) Shaul Ladany, athlete; 2) Shmuel Lalkin, head of the delegation; 3) Kehat Shorr, marksman; 4) Mark Slavin, wrestler; 5) Zelig Shtroch, marksman; 6) Andrei Spitzer, fencing coach; 7) Esther Shachmorov, hurdler/sprinter; 8) Yitzhak Caspi, deputy leader; 9) Dan Alon, fencer; 10) Gad Tsabari, wrestler; 11) Eliezer Halfin, wrestler; 12) Shlomit Nir, swimmer; 13) Henry Hershkowitz, marksman; 14) Yitzhak Fuchs, team chairman; 15) Yossef Ro
mano, weight lifter; 16) Dr. Kurt Weil; 17) Amitzur Shapira, athletics coach; 18) Tuvia Skolsky, weight lifting coach; 19) Ze’ev Friedman, weight lifter; 20) Yaakov Springer, weight lifting judge; 21) David Berger, weight lifter; 22) Moshe Weinberg, wrestling coach

  The Israeli Olympic team parades in Olympic Stadium, Munich, August 26, 1972, during the opening ceremony. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

  A member of the Black September commando group is seen wearing a hood on the balcony of the building where they are keeping the hostages. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

  Dr. Manfred Schreiber, Munich’s chief of police, looks at his watch while discussing the deadline with Issa, at right, outside the Israeli living quarters in the Olympic Village. The two men in the background are plainclothes police. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

  Tony, second in command of the terrorists, leans out of a window to talk to Issa during negotiations with police chief Schreiber, far left, and West German interior minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher outside the Olympic Village residence in Connollystrasse 31. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

  German police, armed with submachine guns and dressed in unassuming tracksuits, climb onto the roof of the building where the Israeli athletes are being held. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

  Ankie Spitzer, widow of the slain Israeli fencing coach Andrei Spitzer, surveys the room at Munich’s Olympic Village where her husband was held. Chalk outlines made by German police trace the impact of bullets. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

  The two West German helicopters that carried the armed terrorists and their nine Olympian hostages pictured at Fürstenfeldbruck air force base outside of Munich. The helicopter in the foreground is burned out as a result of a hand grenade set off by one of the terrorists. Nine of the eleven hostages were killed in the shootout at the air base. Five terrorists and one German policeman also died. Photo courtesy Associated Press.