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

by Klein, Aaron J.

  Meanwhile, two undercover combatants arrived separately at the Opland Turis Hotel in the town. The assassins waited for a call from Harari. The Mossad combatants were dark-skinned, had black hair, and drove rental cars with Oslo plates. An anomalous sight in this sleepy town, they attracted attention.

  In the evening hours, the man fingered as Salameh and his pregnant partner left the apartment for the local movie theater.

  The Israeli surveillance crew had no trouble following; the woman wore a bright yellow raincoat. The couple did not act tense or anxious. They did not try to shake the surveillance. They went straight to the box office in Lillehammer’s only movie theater and bought a pair of tickets for Where Eagles Dare, an American war movie starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. It chronicled a group of American soldiers on a suicide mission at the end of World War II. An excited and keyed-up member of the surveillance squad called the rest of the crew, who were in the middle of dinner, to tell them to get ready. The squad spread out to their designated spots, coiled and waiting.

  No one on the surveillance squad questioned certain incongruities. Why was Ali Hassan Salameh, the notorious Palestinian terrorist, who was known to be living in Beirut, riding a bicycle in remote Lillehammer, Norway—population: twenty thousand? Why was he so familiar with the streets? Why did he take a pregnant blond Norwegian to the movies? Salameh, despite his reputation at the Mossad and Israeli intelligence as a serial playboy, was married and had two young sons. It required a giant leap to assume that Salameh was leading a double life with a pregnant Norwegian. No one was sent to check his apartment, to look for drafts of terrorist plots. Harari and his agents believed that they had found their man, even if it required a pernicious suspension of logic and several cut corners.

  Zvi Zamir was on his way to Lillehammer, flying on a fake passport, undercover. As in previous assassination operations, he asked to be near the operation and to authorize it from up close. But by late evening he was stuck at Schiphol Airport, waiting for a connecting flight to Oslo.

  “Is this our man?” Zamir asked, after the operators connected him.

  “Yes,” Harari answered.

  “Are you sure?” added Zamir.

  “Yes,” responded Harari.

  “Okay, you have my authorization.”

  That was the second conversation between Harari and Zamir that day. The first time they spoke, Zamir requested that Harari verify, as he would again, that they had found the man they sought.

  At 2235 hours the couple left the movie theater and walked in silence to the bus stop. Harari sent the two assassins to Porobakakan Street, where they waited in darkness next to one of the houses. The bus arrived at the stop and the couple boarded without hesitation. The surveillance team followed. The couple got off the bus, calm and relaxed. They held hands, talking quietly to each other as they strolled along Porobakakan Street, walking leisurely up the inclining street toward their house. A car coming in the opposite direction stopped several yards away. The two men in the backseat jumped out, withdrew their silenced Berettas, and shot the man ten times at close range. They stepped back into the car and sped off down the hill.

  The bullets had torn through the man’s vital organs. The woman knelt down next to him, screaming wildly. A neighbor, a young nurse named Dagny Bring, looked out of her window and called the police. Within three minutes, a police car arrived. Ten minutes later, an ambulance arrived; attempts at resuscitation failed. Fifteen minutes after arriving at the local hospital, the man was pronounced dead.

  According to the original plan, Harari and the two assassins were to leave Lillehammer separately, then travel south to Oslo as fast as possible; by the early morning hours they would be scattered in different countries throughout Europe. The members of the surveillance team also headed for Oslo. There, they were supposed to return the rental cars, turn over the keys to the rented apartments they had used during the operation, and sweep, making sure that no “tails” or footprints had been left behind. They were to wait a few days and then get out of Oslo.

  Early in the morning, R., Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, called his colleague in Branch 4, a talented young captain from the Targets section, and revealed, “We took him out. We got Salameh, in Norway.”

  “What? That’s impossible!”

  “I’m telling you, we got him,” R. insisted.

  “But it can’t be,” the officer shouted, slamming his fist down hard on the desk. “He wasn’t there. It’s a mistake!”

  When the head of Branch 4 debriefed his officers about the amazing assassination in Norway, the officers, appalled, said, “It can’t be, he wasn’t there.”

  In Monday’s Norwegian newspapers, giant headlines announced the murder of a young Moroccan by the name of Achmed Bouchiki, killed in Lillehammer on Saturday night. Caesarea officers suspected that the name was just another one of the cover identities Ali Hassan Salameh used while traveling abroad. But they were terribly wrong; they had made an awful mistake. Caesarea’s assassination team had trailed and murdered the wrong man.

  A reporter and photographer had rushed to the scene right after the murder. Interviews with eyewitnesses and neighbors revealed the presence of strangers in fancy cars, Mercedes and Mazdas, driving around the neighborhood, pausing in front of the apartment building earlier that day. The reporter knew he had a major story: this was the first murder in Lillehammer in forty years. He had no idea what he really had.

  The reporter knew Bouchiki from around town. In a two-page article he described the man as a thirty-year-old Moroccan who had lived in Lillehammer for the past four years. His wife, Toril Larsen Bouchiki, was Norwegian. She was in her seventh month of pregnancy. Bouchiki, the article noted, had emigrated from Morocco in the hope of improving his life. He worked as a waiter, and supplemented his salary with a part-time job at the local pool. Years later it became clear that the meeting with Kamal Benaman on the balcony of the Karoline Café was an innocent get-together between two North Africans, a chance to speak a few words of Arabic and catch up on news from home.

  Oslo papers raised the possibility of a connection between the arraignment of four foreigners with foreign passports—Patricia Roxburgh, Leslie Orbaum, Marianne Gladnikoff, and Dan Art—and the shooting in Lillehammer. The initial reports were unclear, unable to explain how the four detainees were connected to the murdered man. Some raised the possibility that it was a drug deal gone wrong.

  On Sunday morning, Dan Art, an Israeli of Danish origin who went by the name Dan Arbel in Israel, was taken into custody. He was using his real passport while fulfilling an auxiliary role in the Mossad mission. He was recruited for this mission at the last minute, brought on board because of his command of the language, a skill the Caesarea combatants lacked. He could read the street signs, verify addresses over the telephone, order hotel rooms, rent cars, and find suitable safe houses. Marianne Gladnikoff, a Swedish Jew who had been picked by Caesarea’s human resources division shortly after she moved to Israel—and had been suggested as a suitable candidate for support and logistical operations in Scandinavian countries—was arrested along with Art/Arbel. The two were stopped at the Pornavo Airport returning the team’s rental cars. They had no cover story prepared and failed to explain why they were driving cars with plates the police were looking for (the two cars had been spotted at a roadblock speeding out of Lillehammer—and struck an officer as suspicious). Neither of the two was a Mossad combatant. They talked as soon as they were taken in for questioning. The information they provided led to the arrest of two senior members of the surveillance unit. The veteran agents were traveling undercover as British citizen Leslie Orbaum and Canadian citizen Patricia Roxburgh.

  Leslie Orbaum was none other than Avraham Gemer, staff officer and head of the unit. He was a tough and stubborn man who did not cooperate with the investigators and stuck to his hole-ridden cover story, that he was British citizen Orbaum, aged twenty-nine, a teacher and librarian from Leeds, vacationing in Norway.
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  “Your name can’t be Leslie Orbaum,” the police investigator charged. “This man doesn’t exist. We checked thoroughly.”

  “So I don’t have a name,” Gemer answered angrily.

  Patricia Roxburgh, the woman taken into custody, was actually Sylvia Rafael. She was a Caesarea combatant who had participated in numerous operations in Europe, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. An attractive thirty-six-year-old Jew, Rafael was born in Capetown, South Africa. She was an amateur photographer. In 1963, she arrived in Israel; by 1965, she had been recruited by Caesarea’s human resources department. Her skills as a combatant were evident from the start. She was calm, quick-witted, and trustworthy. She was the type of woman who could mingle in any society and engender a feeling of security and trust. Rafael preferred to keep her independence, though: she did not join the Mossad full-time, choosing to participate only in certain missions. Caesarea kept her close at hand and requested her services often. Her hobby had served her well on numerous occasions. Using a Canadian or South African passport, she presented herself as a freelance reporter and photographer scouring the area for a juicy story.

  Rafael claimed to be a Canadian freelance journalist on vacation who happened to meet Leslie Orbaum, an old acquaintance, by chance, at the Zurich airport. On the spot the two decided to travel to Norway for a vacation. There they met Art/Arbel and Gladnikoff and decided to share an apartment with them.

  The investigators were not convinced. There were serious contradictions in the four versions of events the detainees recounted. They could not corroborate the details of the time they lived together.

  When the Oslo police searched Dan Art’s belongings they found documents with a phone number that led to the arrest of two additional Israelis, Zvi Steinberg and Michael Dorf, who were staying in the private residence of Yigal Eyal, security officer for the Israeli embassy in Oslo. The two men were logistics and communications agents for the Mossad. They had found temporary shelter in the security officer’s apartment. In Steinberg’s coat pocket, the police found a first-class train ticket from Oslo to Copenhagen, set to leave at 2210 hours that night. As they searched through Steinberg’s and Dorf’s suitcases and personal items, more incriminating evidence was discovered. The Caesarea agents had been negligent during the final stages of the operation. With Dorf and Steinberg arrested, the number of detained Israelis rose to six.

  Caesarea’s grand pretensions were unveiled during the investigation of the shaky Dan Art/Arbel, a claustrophobic, and Marianne Gladnikoff, the junior agent. Blindly determined, the Mossad had arrived in drowsy Lillehammer and assassinated a man whom they mistakenly took for a Palestinian terrorist. The police investigation and the detainees’ testimonies revealed the incompetent, unprofessional behavior of many team members. Caesarea’s senior officers had a raging desire to complete the mission at any cost, which caused them to act without even a minimal amount of caution. They were arrogant, reckless, overconfident, and stubborn. Their fundamental mind-set flaws were the main reason the wrong man died and the mission was exposed. Mike Harari and the two assassins managed to escape by the skin of their teeth. Only by chance did they avoid being caught.

  The Israeli government was unsure how to handle the arrest of the six Mossad operatives in Norway. One of Golda Meir’s worst nightmares had come true. There were long conversations about the right way to respond. The basic question: should Israel take responsibility for the assassination or try to distance itself? As in the past (in several incidents in Arab countries), the government in Jerusalem chose to take the middle path. Without publicly acknowledging their role in sending the team, the government sent Foreign Ministry legal advisor Meir Rosenne to Norway, and shortly thereafter, Eleazar Palmor, a Foreign Ministry official who was appointed special advisor to the embassy. The government ordered Palmor to follow the trial closely, establish connections with local legal bodies, and tend to the needs of the detainees.

  In Golda Meir’s office in Jerusalem, Zvi Zamir and Mike Harari turned in their resignations in the presence of her military aide, Yisrael Lior. She refused to accept them. “There are people in jail,” she said. “You can’t get up and leave; there is work to be done.”

  On Friday, four days after the episode was exposed, Meir sent Lior to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, to check on Harari’s emotional and mental state. Harari did not blame himself for the mistake or the detention of six agents under his command. When asked about the embarrassing affair, he said, with an almost Clintonian eloquence, “I take responsibility upon myself, but not the guilt.” At other times, he said, “When the sharpest combatants succeeded, it was my success; when they failed, it was my failure.”

  The six sat for a public trial, the focus of intense media coverage in Norway, Israel, and the rest of the world. Sylvia Rafael impressed reporters with her calm appearance and witty demeanor. When Avraham Gemer was called to the witness stand, he sat there a short while, stubborn and distracted. Only Dan Art/Arbel appeared shocked and afraid. He wrung his hands nervously as he explained his reasons for joining the “Scandinavian mission.” He said that the operation appealed to him because his expenses were paid and he had just purchased a new house in Israel, which he wanted to furnish. Asked the prosecutor: “Did you really believe that Israel would step in to assist an illegal group working in Norway?” Answered Art/Arbel: “To tell you the truth, because of the good relations between Norway and Israel, I thought that the issue would be solved in private between the two nations. It was my innocence that made me think like that.” Arbel said on the stand that he had given the Oslo police investigators a number in the Hadar Dafna Building in Tel Aviv—256-230—so that they could confirm his story.

  Avraham Gemer was incensed. Sensitive intelligence was being bandied about in public. He requested, by way of his representative, that the trial resume behind closed doors. The court agreed. Meanwhile, the reporters dashed out of the courtroom and ordered the operator to connect them to 256-230 in Tel Aviv. A recording with a message in English said, “This number is no longer connected.”

  On February 1, 1974, the six were sentenced. Michael Dorf, a communications and codes agent, was the only one found not guilty and released. The five other Israelis were found guilty and sentenced as follows: Zvi Steinberg, logistical agent for the operation, was sentenced to one year in prison for gathering information for a foreign country; Marianne Gladnikoff was sentenced to two and half years for her involvement in the murder. Dan Art/Arbel was sentenced to five years for having secondhand knowledge of a premeditated murder. Avraham Gemer and Sylvia Rafael were sentenced to five and a half years for their involvement in the murder. The court found that all six played minor roles in the shooting of Bouchiki, when compared to the assassins and the operational planners who had managed to escape.

  The bitter mistake that cost the waiter, Achmed Bouchiki, his life, weighed like a millstone on the shoulders of the state of Israel. It had long-lasting effects on Israel—in its relations with Norway and with other nations, as it was suddenly seen as a state carrying out its own brand of international terror.

  For years, Israel denied responsibility for the incident. Only in January 1996 did Prime Minister Shimon Peres veer away from years of Israeli government policy. He sent a leading Israeli lawyer to Oslo to conduct compensation negotiations with the family of the murdered victim. Israel agreed to pay for the shooting of the father of the family without taking official responsibility for the act. The negotiations continued for but a few hours. An agreement was quickly reached, in which Israel expressed regret over the actions in Lillehammer and offered compensation to the family totaling almost $400,000.

  Thirty-one years after the court’s verdict, on a warm, clear winter day, veteran Caesarea combatants and staff officers attended the funeral of their friend, combatant Sylvia Rafael, who had lived for the past twenty years in South Africa with her partner, Norwegian lawyer Anneus Schodt, her defense attorney during the Oslo trial. During the long legal ordeal, they had fallen
in love. He had left his family following her release from prison. On the afternoon of February 15, 2005, she was buried in the small cemetery at Kibbutz Ramat Ha’Kovesh, which had adopted her during her incarceration. She was buried at age sixty-seven, in the heart of the fields and in the shade of cypress trees.

  Dozens of friends, many of them with salt-and-pepper hair and walking sticks, stood around her grave. Three former heads of the Mossad came to pay their final respects. They stood around the grave. Mike Harari, Caesarea commander, the man responsible for the Lillehammer mission that landed her in jail, offered a eulogy: “Sylvia was a Caesarean of noble stock, who volunteered to be a combatant for the nation of Israel . . . . They say that those who don’t act, don’t make mistakes, and never have problems. We acted! We did so much and we succeeded. When we succeeded, they called us ‘professionals,’ ‘the hand of God,’ and more. And when we failed, they called us ‘shlomeils.’ The truth is we weren’t shlomeils, and we weren’t professionals. We simply fulfilled our mission to defend the nation of Israel.”

  30 CLOUDY SKIES SAVE ARAFAT

  TEL AVIV, AIR FORCE OPERATIONS ROOM SPRING 1974

  Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Mor picked up the scrambled phone. “Mor,” he said, tight for time, preoccupied by the dozens of raw intelligence reports that had landed on his desk since early morning. The person on the other end of the line was equally direct. “Initial, unchecked reports show that Arafat is at Fatah headquarters in Nabatiya, for a meeting with local commanders. We’ll be back in touch as necessary.”

  Mor swallowed, no longer distracted by paperwork. “You sure it’s him?”

  “That’s what it sounds like,” was the reply.

  “Keep me updated,” Mor said before slamming down the phone. He pondered the news for two beats, then called the deputy commander of Military Intelligence. He relayed the facts as he had heard them.