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

by Klein, Aaron J.

  Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir addressing the Knesset. Photo courtesy GPO.

  Aharon Yariv, the head of Military Intelligence until October 1972 when he became advisor on terrorism under Prime Minister Golda Meir. Photo courtesy GPO.

  Three surviving terrorists from Munich at a press conference upon their release in Libya. From left to right: Adnan Al-Jishey, Jamal Al-Jishey, and Mohammed Safady. Photo courtesy Getty Images.

  Then Chairman Yasar Arafat and Kamal Nasser are pictured here engaged in conversation prior to a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in Cairo, on February 27, 1971. Photo courtesy Associated Press.

  Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), considered a major leader of Fatah, was the mastermind of the Munich attack. Photo courtesy Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.

  Ali Hassan Salameh, one of Yasser Arafat’s confidantes and the head of Force 17 in Fatah. He was killed by an Israeli-initiated car bomb on January 22, 1979, in Beirut. Photo courtesy Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs.

  Abu-Daoud (center), who claimed responsibility for the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes in Munich, is pictured here being escorted by French police at Paris’s Orly Airport, January 11, 1977. Photo courtesy AFP/Getty Images.

  Barak would activate the coordinated attack with five scratchy transmissions from his own, internal radio system. Betzer counted them out with his fingers, clenching his fist on the fifth. A second member of the squad flipped the switch on the activation device. Several seconds of silence ticked by. Suddenly the sharp popping sound of gunfire rose from the street. Two more seconds passed before the detonation device exploded, blowing the door off its hinges and filling the hall with smoke. Betzer and another commando stormed in. They knew the layout from the endless drills and simulations. Running down the hall toward the workroom, Betzer saw a familiar face peek out of the bedroom. He raised his Uzi at Abu-Yussef, the man whose picture he had kept in his breast pocket. The PLO activist slammed the door shut. Betzer unleashed a long blast of fire and then kicked it in. Both commandos found Abu-Yussef dead in a pool of blood, his fatally injured wife by his side. Betzer, worried by the shooting in the street, decided not to pick up Abu-Yussef’s papers as planned, despite the waterproof bags they carried for that express purpose. He commanded his soldiers to follow him to the street below.

  The other two teams were similarly successful. The spokesman, Kamal Nasser, was caught by surprise, sitting at his desk, in his pajamas, working on a eulogy for a friend. He ducked beneath the desk, opened fire, and hit one of the commandos in the leg. The second soldier through the door shot Nasser dead. The third target, Kamal Adwan, died in front of his wife and kids, a cold AK-47 in his hand. The soldiers shoved piles of paper into the bags and left the apartment within two minutes. Racing down the stairs, an apartment door opened, triggering immediate fire from the tense commandos. A seventy-year-old Italian woman, investigating the nighttime noise and commotion, was killed.

  They raced out of the house; a firefight was in progress. Barak and Levine, in wigs and makeup, had been standing next to the doctor and naval commando when a curious security guard got out of a parked sedan and approached them. Crossing the street, he pulled out his weapon. Barak and Levine waited until he was a few yards away, drew their silenced pistols, and fired. The security guard retreated to his car, firing over his shoulder. Barak and Levine returned fire with their stock-less Uzis. A stray bullet activated the horn of the car, waking the neighbors, and probably prompting them to call the police, who would arrive with shocking alacrity. This gun battle is what Major Biran saw from the deck of the missile boat.

  Once the security guard stopped firing, Barak summoned the getaway cars. As they pulled to a stop, a police Land Rover turned onto Vardun Street. Betzer tossed a grenade onto the canvas roof of the vehicle. Everyone inside was killed or maimed in the explosion. The soldiers squeezed back into the Buicks and raced toward the beach, tires squealing. The last car sprayed Ninja spikes behind them to impede any followers. Once they had slid back into the main artery of traffic, the drivers resumed a casual pace, arousing no suspicion. They parked on the seaside promenade, left the keys in the ignition, and went down to the water.

  The naval commando from Barak’s team signaled his buddies in the rubber Zodiacs waiting offshore. Their affirmation of the transmission was the first sign of life Biran and the other staff officers at the command center had heard since the teams had left the missile boat. They still had no idea whether the mission was a success, whether there were dead or injured; but they knew they were back. Biran breathed a sigh of relief. The thirty longest minutes of his life were over.

  Boarding the missile boats, they were updated about the other components of the mission. Shahak’s force, also in civilian garb and escorted by Mossad combatant drivers, had been engaged in a fierce firefight in front of the DFLP building. Two soldiers were killed, one critically injured. The forward entry team was able to lay the explosive devices under heavy fire and damage the building. Lieutenant Colonel Amnon Shahak would be awarded a citation for valor for his command under fire. The naval commandos and the paratroopers encountered no resistance, but, due to faulty intelligence, also found no weapons or demolitions factories.

  The Israeli force returned to Haifa in the early morning hours. Chief of Staff Elazar received them. “Israel won’t play by the rules of partial war; wars are not won with a strong defense,” he said later to journalists.

  Spring of Youth made a searing impression in the Arab world, a combination of anger, embarrassment, and awe. In Lebanon, the government collapsed in the aftermath of the attack. Lebanese newspapers published eyewitness accounts of two beautiful women—one a blonde, one a brunette—fighting like armed dervishes in the streets of Beirut, keeping police, army, and Palestinian operatives at bay with long bursts of automatic fire. Stories abounded. Myths grew. Israel’s message of deterrence spread—the Mossad and the Israelis can reach anyone, anywhere, even in their bedrooms. Many contend that Spring of Youth resonated more powerfully than any of the Mossad’s previous missions in Europe.

  Half a million people attended the funerals. The top-level PLO and Fatah officials were deeply alarmed. Their lives were suddenly in peril. According to Abu-Iyad, Arafat was in one of the adjacent buildings that night. Both he and Abu-Iyad felt at home in the three dead PLO officials’ homes. It was perfectly conceivable that Arafat and Abu-Iyad could have gone up to their friends’ apartments for coffee or dinner following the PLO Central Committee convention held the night of the raid. Ali Hassan Salameh was home that night too. He lived two hundred yards from where Barak and Levine stood.

  Years later Abu-Iyad wrote in Stateless that he had asked to sleep at Kamal Nasser’s house that night. The bachelor turned him down, explaining that he had to write his eulogy for the poet friend. Abu-Iyad writes that he left dejectedly. Instead of spending the night with the charismatic spokesman, he went to the apartment of the three Munich “survivors,” to hear stories of their “adventures.” He and one of his assistants, Tirawi, went up to the hide-out apartment of the Munich “survivors” at 2130 hours.

  “All of a sudden I heard shots . . . . The increasing fire, accompanied by loud booms, made me suspicious . . . . And then the doorman ran into the apartment and cried out in a garbled voice: ‘Al-Yahud, al-Yahud, the Jews are here!’ He was shaking uncontrollably, unable to say another word. The prophecy I voiced a few days earlier without much conviction nearly came true. The Israelis were at our doors, plain and simple.”

  The myth of Israel’s military capacity and the long reach of the Mossad was hitting its peak. Built largely on the assassinations in Europe, it became truly formidable after Operation Spring of Youth, remembered by Palestinians as “Amaliyat Vardun,” Vardun Mission, an enduring testament of the Israeli intelligence agencies’ ability to strike anywhere on the planet.

  27 EUROPE’S INDIFFERENCE

>   ATHENS, ARISTIDES HOTEL WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11, 1973

  Spring of Youth did not demand Caesarea’s full attention. While that operation was in motion, two more were under way. The first was a soft target in Nicosia, Cyprus; the second, a slightly more difficult man to reach, in a hotel in Athens, Greece.

  On the evening of April 9, Caesarea combatants, with the help of a Keshet specialist, laid an explosive device under the hotel bed of Ziad Mokhsi. Mokhsi, the PLO representative in Cyprus, replaced Hussain Abu-Khair, who had been killed by the Mossad more than two months prior. Mokhsi died instantly. R., Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, could open the cabinet in his office and draw another black X.

  It seems, however, that Ziad Mokhsi had no connection to Munich. The assassination fit the rule of deterrence, but Mokhsi’s primary sin was his vulnerability. Israeli intelligence agencies interpreted his death sentence differently, of course. To them, he deserved to be added to the list because of his work as a PLO representative, which often entailed assisting in the preparatory stages of Fatah attacks against Israel and its citizens. As fate would have it, two amateurish terror attacks failed on the very day of his death. The Libyan-backed National Arab Youth Organization attempted to attack the Israeli ambassador’s house in Nicosia, and to hijack an Israeli Arkia Airlines plane on the runway.

  Moussa Abu-Zaiad, one of Salameh’s operatives, came to Athens planning to execute a major terror attack. A tough target, Abu-Zaiad behaved as if he were in enemy territory in Athens. He rarely left his room in the Aristides Hotel and forbade housekeeping from entering. “He looked preoccupied,” one hotel worker remarked. On April 9, he sent a cable to a post office box in Beirut: “If you would like the job to be done right, you had best come over here.”

  On his way to the port of Piraeus near Athens he went to great lengths to shake any possible tail, switching cabs in the middle of his trip, taking many side streets, and paying careful attention to his back. Caesarea combatants followed him throughout. After a few days of surveillance, the commander of the mission decided that the best way to end Abu-Zaiad’s life without jeopardizing safety or cover was to plant an explosive device in his room. All they needed was Zamir’s approval before picking the appropriate time and place.

  Spring of Youth shook Abu-Zaiad from his precautionary routine. He had heard snippets of information about the stunning mission that ended the lives of numerous senior Fatah activists, but was still unable to piece together the full story. He finally left his room to buy a newspaper. The commander of the assassination team sent a surveillance crew to follow him, and, if necessary, detain him, until the Keshet burglary operative and the Caesarea combatant finished attaching a bomb under his hotel room bed. Abu-Zaiad hurried to a nearby newspaper stand, bought a few papers with screaming headlines about the raid in Beirut, and returned to his room. He left the Mossad operatives little time to operate; but it was enough. On April 11, just before dawn, Abu-Zaiad received a phone call. He answered, his voice groggy and annoyed. His presence confirmed, the line went dead. A Caesarea assassin pushed a button on a remote control, ripping the PLO terrorist to shreds. Mission accomplished.

  Two months later, on June 13, 1973, a deafening explosion ripped through a Mercedes in Rome’s city center. The two men in the car carried passports in the names of Abed Al-Hamid Shibi and Abed Al-Hadi Naka’a. Both died from their wounds not long after the explosion. The ambush, laid by Caesarea combatants, prevented a planned attack on the El Al offices in Rome, which were located opposite the parked car. The Mossad had stopped another attack dead in its tracks.

  Days later, in late June 1973, Aharon Yariv announced that he was retiring from his post as advisor to the prime minister on terrorism. In a parting interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, he spoke at length about Palestinian international terrorism. “Since the Sabena hijacking Palestinian groups have attempted sixty-seven attacks abroad that we know of; forty-eight of them failed or were prevented. It is quite possible there were additional attacks in the works that we know nothing about. I would like to point out that of the sixty-seven planned attacks, forty-eight were aimed at Israeli targets, and thirty-seven of those failed.”

  After nine months as the prime minister’s advisor, the retired general decided to turn to politics. In hindsight, his retirement marked a transition, from an obsessive chase for terrorists and revenge to a routine war against Palestinian terrorism.

  The assassinations in Europe and the Middle East, along with the astonishingly successful raid in Beirut, a Mossad-IDF collaboration, were starting to reap dividends. The mood in the agency lifted. There were clear signs of a lull in terror activity. The Mossad still buzzed with activity. Its expanded Caesarea unit was up to its eyeballs in work. Military Intelligence’s Branch 4, already through with its technological overhaul, began introducing commandos into its ranks. These men, who, as Ehud Barak once said, “had seen the whites of the enemies’ eyes,” brought their knowledge of the field into the office. The Shabak, instructed by the Kopel Report to assume responsibility for the security and safety of Israel’s embassies and consulates abroad, worked around the clock. A written code of security laws for the protection of Israelis abroad was enacted. From that moment forth, for instance, any official Israeli delegation, whether it be for sports, agriculture, or culture, would be accompanied by guards, armed if the host country permitted it.

  Nine long months had passed since the Munich Massacre. Nine months of kinetic Israeli existence, the highs and lows, on the backdrop of perpetual chaos. The fervor to avenge the death of the athletes began to subside. A thirst for preventive and deterrent assassinations was replacing it. Many of the organization heads and PLO activists who were being targeted now had no connection to Munich or Fatah–Black September. Intelligence agency bosses feared another unexpected attack. That fear was what kept them awake at night. Shabak officers called Branch 4 at all hours, looking for fact-based warnings. Attacks had been prevented and were doubtless being deterred, but for years after Munich, terror attacks in Israel and abroad would continue nonetheless, and always took the intelligence agencies by complete surprise. “Come to the control room . . .” was still the first many officers would hear about an attack.

  In his farewell interview, Yariv addressed the aspect of international collaboration in the war on terrorism. “The cooperation between Israel and other governments is an important factor in our fight. Not all contribute equally. In many cases we would like to see certain governments do far more in the fight against Arab terrorism. I am particularly irked by the forgiveness exhibited by some nations toward terrorists caught in the act. They are neither tried nor punished. In the long term, these nations will be burnt by this policy. In today’s atmosphere it is simply naive to think that clemency and forgiveness toward Arab terrorism will reduce the risk of terror at home. On the contrary, firm steps against Arab terrorism will deter future terror within these nations.”

  Yariv bemoaned the intolerable ease with which weapons and explosives crossed European borders, even after the Munich Massacre. One foiled attempt took place on October 23, 1972, when a Palestinian in transit at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport was stopped with forty pounds of explosives, twenty-one letter bombs, and a stash of grenades, detonators, and pistols. The contraband was “voluntarily” surrendered by the traveler, Kamal Al-Khatib, a Jerusalem-born Fatah activist, who was carrying an Algerian diplomatic passport. He was released several hours later and allowed to continue on his way. The authorization to free the man came from the top levels of the Dutch government, eliciting scathing criticism from the opposition parties in the Dutch parliament. Security officials at the airport were perplexed by the decision. Al-Khatib’s mission began in Damascus and was to end in either Argentina or Brazil but, according to the senior-level security officials at the airport, he was prepared to leave the explosives in Amsterdam “for further care.” Moreover, they said, his diplomatic immunity was useless to him as a defense, since he was not a dipl
omat serving in Holland, where immunity would have shielded him from local law.

  The man’s Algerian passport was the tip of an iceberg. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Algeria was an ardent and outspoken backer of Palestinian terror. In 1969, for example, the oil pipeline in the Golan Heights was blown up; only Algeria publicly supported the attack. Algeria alone supported the 1970 PFLP hijacking and exploding of five planes in Jordan, and it was again Algeria that registered a formal complaint against Switzerland at the U.N. when that nation decided to bring the attackers of an El Al plane in Zurich to trial. Israeli intelligence agencies had been claiming for years that Algerian embassies and consulates across Europe served as weapons caches and points of departure for Palestinian terrorists working under the guise of diplomats. Algerian embassies were buffet-style banquets for terrorists: all they had to do was walk through the door and help themselves.

  Since the military coup that brought Colonel Muammar Qaddafi to power in late 1969, Libya had also aided and abetted terrorists with logistical support, weapons, shelter, and intelligence information, Israel would claim for years. The heads of state of other nations, such as Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, even publicly supported the hijacking of planes. The latter two went so far as to create and support Palestinian terror organizations that acted against Israel both within and beyond its territorial boundaries.

  The Netherlands, like many other European countries, refused to take firm action against Palestinian terrorists, at a time when Europe was their main theater of operations. Many of the attacks were extortionate, demanding the release of certain prisoners in exchange for the resolution of a current standoff. A conciliatory tone was predominant. Abu-Iyad himself said that after Fatah terrorists opened fire on the Jordanian ambassador to Britain in downtown London, “The British authorities, like many of their European counterparts, preferred to avoid complications, taking no great pains to capture the Palestinian commandos.”