Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (10 page)

17
                  
THE PLAN TAKES SHAPE

JERUSALEM, PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1972, 1100H

Golda Meir looked up from behind a pile of paper at the men entering her office. Brigadier General Yisrael Lior, her military aide, was escorting Pinchas Kopel, the newly retired national chief of police, and Moshe Kashti, former director general of the Defense Ministry. The prime minister knew them both and went straight to the point. “Well, will you take the assignment?” she asked. The men nodded their acceptance. Golda, already in office for three long years, leaned back in her chair and set off on a maudlin monologue. She, who was so personally wounded by the murder of the athletes, was being attacked by virtually all the Knesset parties. “‘Did we have any intelligence? Any prior knowledge?’ they ask. I tell them again and again that neither Zvi [Zamir] nor Military Intelligence had any sense of a pending attack. ‘Why were they sent without a security detail?’” She stopped the lament and motioned them to their chairs. “I’m bearing the burden of all this, it’s me they’re crucifying, and now they’re demanding an official parliamentary commission of inquiry. Why do you think they want that? So it can leak?”

Golda lit a Chesterfield. “Find out what happened over there, and why; interview whomever you want. You can have any documents you need.” She looked over at Brigadier General Lior for approval. He was nodding. “If you run into any problems,” she continued, “Yisrael will straighten them out, but you need to be quick about this. You have two weeks.” The prime minister leaned out of her chair to receive an envelope from Lior. It was thick, and the words
TOP SECRET
were printed in bold across the front. She handed it to Pinchas Kopel. “Everything is in here. There are three copies of your mission statement. Give one to Mr. Avigdor Bartel and send him my regards as soon as he returns to Israel. The three of you are the official investigative team charged with assessing the security arrangements at the Munich Olympics.”

The Old Lady, head of state and overseer of the Mossad and the Shabak, hoped that an internal investigative committee would block the growing wave of criticism that threatened to wash over her. Government ministers were already bickering and assigning blame for the security lapses, which, under the hot lights of public speculation, began to smell of ripening negligence. The public began to sense a twin failure: unfocused intelligence gathering, and a lack of security for the athletes. Some were even beginning to question the government’s ability to manage the defense establishment during its counterterrorism campaign.

Golda needed a pressure valve, something to divert the stream of newspaper articles and radio reports away from the debate over culpability. The situation called for a great initiative, a measure both profound and severe. The retaliatory strikes, which bore the code name “Minor Offensive,” were a temporary balm at best. They did not represent a fitting reprisal to Munich, and did nothing to help Israel in its war on terrorism. Golda realized that Israel’s response had to be remorseless, had to unequivocally convey the message that, for those involved in terrorism against Israel or Israelis, death would, like the sword of Damocles, hang menacingly over every head.

That week Golda authorized the outline of a new plan to fight the burgeoning Palestinian terrorism. Drafted by Zamir and subsequently complemented by the new advisor to the prime minister on terrorism, Major General (ret.) Aharon Yariv, formerly of Military Intelligence, the plan addressed a number of issues. Chief among them was “prevention”—the elimination of terror operatives who harbored malevolent intentions toward Israel and Israeli citizens. Golda described the objectives succinctly from the podium of the Knesset one week later: “Wherever a plot is being woven, wherever people are planning to murder Jews and Israelis—that is where we need to strike.”

A second, more complex element of the plan related to deterrence. The hope was that a withering series of assassinations would deter terrorists, those assisting them, and those contemplating joining their ranks. In addition, once the new strategy took hold, even the most hardened terrorists, Yariv and Zamir believed, would have to spend a great deal of their time and energy on personal preservation. The message to all terror operatives would be clear: the state of Israel will settle its score with all who have harmed or intend to harm its citizens. Israel had assassinated its enemies before, but now assassination would become a major tool in counterterrorism.

The initial and most obvious candidates were the Black September operatives responsible for Munich. They were to be found and watched until a plan to kill them could be formulated. They would lead the list; as new plots were uncovered, new names would be added. Each mission would come before the prime minister for approval. Although indictments and assassination plans would be frequently discussed with cabinet members, the prime minister alone would ultimately decide the fate of each person.

This is how it worked: A long, internal process would lead to an indictment. When the case was complete, the head of the Mossad, assuming the role of prosecutor, would argue for a guilty verdict and a death sentence; the prime minister, along with members of cabinet, would act as judges. In several instances in the months and years ahead cabinet members and the prime minister would suspend sentencing, demanding further incriminating evidence. These “trials” were top secret; aides were kept in the dark and official records bore no mention of them. Years later, the forum that decided the fate of these men was labeled Committee X by the international media.

Mike Harari, commander of Caesarea, was always present during the pseudo-trials. His staff officers and combatants would construct and carry out the operational plans. Sometimes, after detailing a proposed assassination mission, Zamir and Harari would be given the go-ahead to proceed with the planning of the mission, but not its execution: the bench accepted the prosecution’s case, but withheld sentencing for a later date. Weeks, months, and sometimes years later the head of the Mossad would return to the prime minister with additional operational plans and again request authorization. The prime minister would authorize the plan only when certain that innocent civilians would not be harmed, and that the strategic interests of the state would not be harmed.

It is likely that the word “revenge” is not mentioned anywhere in the archives of government, Mossad, Shabak, and Military Intelligence documents. It was considered improper for a sovereign state to pursue revenge for the blood of the murdered. Yet it motivated, to varying degrees, every officer and official involved, from the prime minister on down.

Golda herself was wary of high-wire assassination plans. In fact, she hesitated before adopting the Zamir-Yariv plan for immediate and uncompromising retaliatory strikes. Shortly before his death twenty years later, Aharon Yariv spoke with BBC reporter Peter Taylor. “As a woman she was not very exhilarated by the idea, but I felt very strongly about it, very strongly indeed. In the end, I succeeded in convincing her. She relented.”

In May 1972, six months before Zamir and Yariv’s plan was drafted, Prime Minister Meir had given her authorization to kill Ghassan Kanafani, a member of the PFLP—the group that launched the Japanese Red Army attack at Lod Airport. He was an active political figure, a poet, and well-known author. His assassination, for which Israel never took credit, raised a lot of questions. Why kill a noncombatant, a noted writer? Moreover, the hit wasn’t clean: a girl, who was posthumously presented as his niece, was killed along with Kanafani when the explosives attached to the chassis of his car detonated.

Golda was not the type of commander in chief to sift through operational details, asking piercing questions about proposed missions. One thought was always foremost in her mind: what will happen to the “boys” if they were caught on foreign soil? Now that she had agreed to a series of assassinations, she worried that a slipup in Europe would require a lot of difficult answers. Israel’s prestige would be tarnished if it became clear that the Jewish state had stooped to the level of its terrorist adversaries. A sovereign state wasn’t supposed to use the terrorists’ tool—fear—or send hit squads to foreign lands.

Yet, in the post-Munich reality, Golda gave the Mossad more leeway than ever before.

Golda’s predecessors tended not to use murder as a means to achieve political and security ends. Previous prime ministers had authorized assassinations only a few times in the young state’s history, usually to prevent an impending attack. Every now and again an assassination plan was presented to them for approval. Levi Eshkol, the prime minister from 1963 to 1969, flat out refused to authorize such missions. His reasoning reflected sobriety: the tool of assassination is ineffective and may provoke terrorists to respond in kind. Killing would beget killing.

Eshkol had to bat down many enticing offers. An example, made public in this book for the first time, came in 1968, when Meir Amit, the head of the Mossad, requested an urgent meeting with the prime minister. A plan to kill Yasser Arafat, the head of Fatah, was in its final stage. There was something unusual in Arafat’s fervor, his determination, and his steadfast terrorist ideology that indicated to the Mossad he would plague Israel for years to come. All that was needed to send him down the path to martyrdom was a nod from Eshkol.

The top secret plan called for an undercover Caesarea combatant to bring a booby-trapped car into Syria—a country officially at war with Israel—and blow it up outside Arafat’s Damascus offices, where he both slept and conducted business. Yossi Yariv, the head of Caesarea at the time, had been working on the plan for six months. Only a handful of people knew the particulars. Under Yariv’s directives a Caesarea combatant transferred a 1959 Chevy to Damascus. The car had made its way from Israel to Syria, via Europe and Lebanon, with one hundred pounds of top-quality explosives hidden beneath the backseat, molded in a hollow-pointed shape for optimal destruction. Once all the components of the plan were in place, Amit approached Eshkol for authorization.

“
Kinderlach,
why should I approve this?” Eshkol asked in Yiddish-peppered Hebrew. “It’s a double-edged sword. Today we kill their leaders and tomorrow they kill ours. It goes on forever. I won’t authorize it.”

Officers at Mossad headquarters were devastated. All the preparations, planning, and risks were in vain. For neither the first nor the last time, an opportunity to neutralize Arafat was missed.

Before Munich, Arafat had been high on the Mossad’s hit list, and although neither the Mossad nor Military Intelligence had the type of evidence admissible in court, both believed he knew of, and signed off on, the Olympic attack. By 1972, however, Arafat was becoming well known on the international circuit. Politics, more than state security, determined his fate. Over the years many secret meetings would be held at Mossad and Military Intelligence headquarters, weighing the pros and cons of keeping him alive. This time, Israel decided to leave him among the living.

As the Munich Massacre continued to echo across the globe, everyone in the Arab world spoke about its “success,” despite the price paid by the
shuhada,
who had sacrificed themselves for the cause. The Europe-based Palestinian
saya’an
s made the most noise, eager to prove their undying allegiance to the homeland they had left. Keen to cash in on Black September’s new popularity, these
saya’an
s spoke freely among friends about their involvement in the planning, execution, and logistical operations tied to the massacre. The buzz, some of it baseless bravado, reached the ears of Tzomet case officers, who were under immense pressure to deliver intelligence about the perpetrators of the attack. In the weeks after the massacre, dozens of Palestinian names, implicated by thin shards of intelligence at best, were passed back to Tel Aviv. There, they were almost automatically put on a secret database of possible targets.