Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (12 page)

20
                  
THE GREAT CAPITULATION

LUFTHANSA FLIGHT OVER ZAGREB, YUGOSLAVIA SUNDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1972, 1600H

Lufthansa Flight 615 from Damascus to Frankfurt took off at 0535 hours
,
with no passengers. The plane and its seven-person crew stopped in Beirut, where thirteen male passengers boarded the flight. Ten miles north of Cyprus, Captain Walter Claussen felt the hard muzzle of a pistol on the back of his neck. “I am the captain now,” a soft voice said in Arabic-accented German. The hijacker took control of the intercom and introduced himself to the passengers as Abu-Ali. He informed them that the flight was now under his command. “Operation Munich,” the mission to free the three Black September terrorists caught alive at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, was under way, he said. If the West German government agreed to free “the three heroes” of the Munich Massacre from their Bavarian jail cells, where they had been held for the past seven and a half weeks, and allowed them safe passage to a friendly Arab state, no one on the flight would be harmed; if not, he and the other terrorist on board would blow up the plane. He took his finger off the intercom’s broadcast button and commanded Claussen to land in Cyprus. They would refuel before proceeding to Germany.

The West German government, without informing their Israeli counterparts, immediately decided to acquiesce to the terrorists’ demands. The incarcerated Black September fighters were an unnecessary burden. Pragmatism demanded their release. Abu-Iyad interpreted Germany’s decision in Middle Eastern terms: in his memoir,
Stateless,
he called it “cowardly.”

Radio reports lured thousands of bystanders to Riem Airport, outside Munich, where hundreds of police, border troops, and armored vehicles awaited the hijacked plane. At 1100 hours
,
the Lufthansa Boeing flew over the airport but did not land, changing course for Zagreb, Yugoslavia. The hijackers altered their plans after the German authorities told them they needed ninety minutes to round up the three prisoners and bring them to the airport. The hijackers, they said, could land in Munich and wait. Claussen reported to air traffic control that Abu-Ali was storming around the cockpit, livid.

The hijackers never explained their sudden change of destination. They may have feared a ruse, a plan that would cripple the plane or a violent takeover mission designed to free the hostages. Now they altered their demands—the Palestinian prisoners were to be brought to Zagreb. The plane circled above the city, waiting for confirmation that the prisoners were on the ground, ready to be swapped. Hours passed and fuel dwindled—Claussen told his captors that there was enough fuel to last until 1730 hours
.

German authorities sent a Condor passenger plane to Zagreb with the CEO of Lufthansa, two police officers, two replacement pilots, and the three prisoners. As the plane approached the Yugoslavian city the two sides had yet to reach an agreement about the terms of the prisoner exchange. The government proposed a simultaneous trade: the Palestinian prisoners for their citizens; Abu-Ali agreed—the three men would be brought on board and flown to an Arab state, in return for the hostages. The German decision was influenced by the pleas of the Lufthansa pilot, who warned that the plane was running perilously low on fuel. “Please hurry up,” he said. “These are our last moments.” When the 727 finally touched ground on the heels of the Condor, there were only two hundred liters of fuel left in its tank—enough for thirty more seconds of flight.

The three newly freed prisoners bounded up the stairs to the plane, but in violation of the agreement, the hijackers refused to free the hostages—they all took off for Libya. At 2100 hours
,
the Boeing 727 reached Tripoli. The hijackers and the released prisoners, who had been partying throughout the flight, were greeted like kings upon arrival. While the West German ambassador to Libya arranged for the immediate return of the hostages to Germany, the freed terrorists held a press conference. International audiences both heard the terrorists’ firsthand version of events in Munich and witnessed the complete capitulation of the German government.

Chancellor Willy Brandt explained Germany’s actions in his own words. “The passengers and the crew were threatened with annihilation unless we released the three Palestinian survivors of the Fürstenfeldbruck massacre. Like the Bavarian government, I then saw no alternative but to yield to this ultimatum and avoid further senseless bloodshed.”

Brandt neglected to mention that West Germany felt threatened by the terrorists incarcerated on their soil. Pressure from Arab countries to release the three had been building since the massacre, and reports of possible revenge operations against Germans and Germany were pouring in. It was only a matter of time before a hijacked plane or some other extortionate measure would “force” the Germans to release the three terrorists, who were, after all, putting German lives at risk.

German, Palestinian, and Israeli sources contended that the hijacking, carried out by PFLP specialists under the command of Wadi Haddad, was coordinated, in advance, with German authorities. Some claim that the West German government paid for the mission, wiring $5 million to the account of the PFLP for the simulated hijacking. When Ulrich Wagner, senior aide to the interior minister Genscher, was asked point-blank and on camera what he thought of the alleged German-Palestinian scheme, he replied, “Yes, I think it’s probably true.” One detail pointing to the likelihood of the scheme was the composition of the passengers: they were few, and they were all male. This unusual occurrence supports, but does not prove, the conspiracy theory.

Whatever the case, the Germans were guided by pragmatism rather than principle—and chose appeasement over confrontation. From the time of the Olympic massacre to the end of the 1980s, there was not a single armed Palestinian attack against Germans, despite Palestinian terrorist activity all over Europe. All the while the German secret service cultivated close ties with most of the Palestinian terror groups, including Fatah. Their main liaison was Atef Bseiso.

West Germany’s speedy release of the Black September terrorists produced astonishment and rage in Israel. The Israeli ambassador was called back to Jerusalem for “consultations.” Israel also promptly launched a retaliatory air raid against four Palestinian training camps in Syria, killing sixty-five people.
Time
magazine explained the reprisal as a move against Hafez Al-Assad’s regime, one of the few that publicly harbored terrorists and financed their operations.

Golda Meir was in her office when she learned of the German decision to free the terrorists. “I was literally physically sickened,” she wrote in her memoirs. Days later, when Zvi Zamir and Mike Harari came to her office seeking authorization to assassinate the PLO representative in Paris, she was quick to agree.

21
                  
A RIPE TARGET

PARIS, 175 RUE D’ALÉSIA FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1972, 0845H

Mahamoud Hamshari, the PLO’s unofficial man in Paris, was a soft target. His job demanded that he meet with anyone interested in discussing the “Palestinian cause.” He had no bodyguard, no nervous tingling on the back of his neck, no instinct to look over his shoulder. He held a Ph.D. in history and espoused progressive political opinions in public. Though the Zu’aytir assassination sent ripples of fear through the Palestinian leadership in Europe, Hamshari thought his status as a quasi-diplomat made him immune from the Mossad’s deadly reach.

Hamshari didn’t think twice when an Italian journalist invited him for coffee. They met near his house at a corner café on the Left Bank. The journalist lobbed softball questions at the pudgy thirty-eight-year-old, who answered at great length in fluent French. After two hours of chitchat the two shook hands. Hamshari offered his card in case any follow-up questions should arise. He had no notion that the inquisitive journalist received his paycheck from Tel Aviv. The agent, an undercover operative from Caesarea, had met with Hamshari to confirm his identity, address, and phone number. Over a cup of coffee, Hamshari had given the Mossad the verification they needed to plan his death.

Getting to Hamshari was relatively easy; executing him without harming his wife and child, while keeping the operatives’ cover intact, was proving difficult. Although surveillance had followed his every move for the past two weeks, Harari and his staff officers had not been able to draft a solid plan. They knew they had to act promptly: soon Hamshari might catch an appraising stare or feel the heat of a tail.

Harari sought assistance outside his Caesarean empire. Although Harari hated the idea of bringing in outsiders, Zvi Zamir ordered him to summon Keshet—Rainbow, the Mossad’s burglary unit, which specialized in covert breaking and entering into locked apartments, hotel rooms, safes, and factories. In 1972, Zvi Malchin commanded the tiny unit. Twelve years before, he had apprehended Adolf Eichmann on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires and brought him, drugged and without the sanction of international law, to an Israeli court for justice.

In those chaotic days the Mossad and Military Intelligence considered all PLO envoys a part of the terrorist infrastructure, believing that attacks were planned in their homes and offices. Quasi-diplomats from the Fatah wing of the PLO often transferred money, mail, and weapons to the armed wing of the party. Like the Jewish
saya’an
s the Mossad used around the world, these expatriated Palestinians didn’t ask questions when their homeland called.

Hamshari was no different in this regard, but the Mossad also believed that he had played a role in the bombing of a Swiss Air flight on February
21, 1970,
from Zurich to Tel Aviv, which took the lives of forty-seven passengers and crew. They also fingered him as an indirect accomplice to a PFLP plan to murder Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, during a trip to Denmark in May 1969. Hamshari’s apartment was allegedly used as an arms storehouse for Black September.

While Hamshari met with the “Italian journalist,” a Keshet operative waited outside his apartment on Rue d’Alésia. With Hamshari’s French wife, Marie-Claude, and their daughter, Amina, under surveillance and far from the home, the operative went to work. It was the second time he had entered Hamshari’s home. A few days earlier he had broken in and snapped photos of the apartment from every conceivable angle. Caesarea’s staff officers pored over the snapshots and decided that a small individual-sized bomb would be the best way to kill the historian. The photos showed that Hamshari worked at his desk. In the mornings, after his wife and child left home, he’d be alone. The operative stuck the thin slice of plastic explosive just under the telephone. The device was activated by a coded electronic signal, which a tiny antenna would pick up and forward to the electric detonator. All they needed was his voice on the phone to verify that he was in the apartment and five hundred meters of unobstructed access to the device.

After checking that everything was in place, the operative left the apartment. He left no sign of his presence.

The next day, Friday, December 8, in the early morning, a few minutes after 0800 hours
,
Marie-Claude headed out with Amina. In a command room not far away, Harari, Zamir, and several staff officers from headquarters waited. The Caesarea surveillance team had reported on Hamshari’s personal habits. He usually crawled back into bed after his wife left for work. He didn’t receive visitors, and the building was quiet late in the morning. The “journalist” dialed Hamshari’s number. He got to the receiver on the third ring.

“Hello?”

“Can I please speak with Dr. Hamshari?”

“He is speaking,” Hamshari said, in the formal French third person.

The Caesarea agent gave his partner an agreed-upon signal. The partner pressed the remote control, sending an electronic signal to the explosive device. The explosion crackled in the still Parisian morning. Hamshari was critically wounded, the apartment blown apart. Three weeks later Hamshari died in his hospital bed from massive internal injuries. Before his death he told investigators from the Paris police about the Italian reporter who called him seconds before the blast.

PLO leaders in Europe began to fear for their lives. The day after the assassination, Arab diplomats convened in Paris and publicly demanded that the French government assume responsibility for their well-being. At the end of the three-hour press conference, Fauzi Gariani, the senior Libyan representative in the city, bemoaned “the atmosphere of Zionist terror in France.”

A steady trickle of news posthumously incriminated Zu’aytir and Hamshari. The sources were always “high-ranking officials” in Israeli intelligence. The deterrent effect was taking hold: Palestinian operatives, rather than planning their next high-profile attack, began to concentrate on their own survival.

By the end of 1972 Caesarea had expanded and evolved. Harari now had three assassination squads of roughly a dozen people each at his disposal. The teams had a basic structure, but were shaped to organically fit each individual mission. There were always three squads—logistics, surveillance, and assassination. The logistics squad rented apartments, drove the cars, spoke the local language, and was in charge of communications—a tedious chore in those days, involving complex codes. The surveillance team, frequently the largest, had many female members (who often acted as parts of “couples”). Their job was to blend into their surroundings. They employed very basic tactics, switching glasses, hats, wigs, and outerwear. As one former Caesarea combatant told me: “We were supposed to walk on the shadow of life.” The final component of each group were the assassins. They were combatants trained in pairs and referred to as “number 1” and “number 2,” generally well-prepared young men from topflight army units.

All members of Caesarea led secret lives even within the Mossad. They were the most elite arm of Israel’s defense forces, and they were reminded of this often. They were told that they were fulfilling the express wishes of the prime minister. The country was behind them.

As the Mossad’s strength grew, so too did the Palestinians’ ability to vanish. The chase intensified, becoming more complicated. Targets disappeared, swallowed by the earth.

Some claimed that Hamshari’s assassination was carried out in a deliberately extravagant manner, strengthening the Mossad’s deterrent message. In fact, the spy agency’s goal was success and safety, not flash. “If I could take them down with a missile from twenty miles away, I would,” an ex-Caesarea officer explained to me. “It isn’t the method that’s important, even if it is interesting and fascinating, it’s the end result that counts. The goal was to intercept and prevent. We checked what he had done in the past, and what damage he could inflict in the future. We acted according to this analysis.”

Chief of Staff Lieutenant General David Elazar spoke before the Israel Defense College’s graduating class on December
19, 1972,
nine days after Hamshari’s assassination in Paris. The Mossad never publicized its role in European assassinations, but Elazar wanted to make a point. “Whoever reads the papers,” he said, “will see Arab hands involved in the death of a number of Arabs in different countries. If you look closely, you will see the Jewish thumbprint in the middle of the mix.”