Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (13 page)

22
                  
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

NICOSIA, CYPRUS, OLYMPIC HOTEL THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1973

Fatah wasn’t flying the white flag. Their search for weak links in Israel’s defenses took them to Thailand, where they found a vulnerable Israeli embassy. Months prior, the remote embassy had received new security directives, but the Thai pace of affairs, their distance from Europe, and the fact that Thailand was low on Israel’s list of priorities all contributed to the laissez-faire security deployment at the embassy. On December
28, 1972,
four armed Palestinians sent by Ali Hassan Salameh breezed past security and walked through a set of unlocked doors into the embassy’s main hall. They took four Israeli men and two women hostage, throwing them into a third-floor room with their hands bound. The Israeli ambassador, Rechavam Amir, and his wife were not among them. The couple had gone out two hours earlier, to attend the coronation of Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn.

The terrorists floated their typewritten demands down to the Thai police waiting below. Black September demanded the release of thirty-six prisoners from Israeli jails. Their list included Kozo Okamoto, serving a life sentence for his role in the Lod Airport attack one and a half years earlier, and Rimah Tanoos and Teresa Khalsa, the two surviving perpetrators of the foiled Sabena attack, both not yet one year into long prison sentences.

The Israeli ambassador returned to the besieged embassy in the company of the Thai prime minister, Thanom Kittikachorn; the Thai chief of staff; and several government ministers. The Thai leaders, all veterans of the armed forces, were enraged by the timing of the attack. Thailand was the only Southeast Asian country that had never been colonized. Their monarchs were still revered. A rolling coin with the likeness of the king was always picked up with a hand, never stopped with an unclean foot. The disruption of the coronation ceremony was a serious affront. The Thais and the Israeli ambassador (who had conducted a quick consultation with the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem) were of one mind regarding the terrorists’ demands—they would not capitulate.

The stalemate was broken by an unlikely source: Mustafa Issawi, the Egyptian ambassador. On directives from President Anwar Sadat, he took an active role in the thirty-hour negotiations with the terrorists. Issawi succeeded in convincing the terrorists to leave Thailand; their preliminary demands were unfulfilled, but two months later, as if disconnected, the Israeli government released several Palestinian corpses to Lebanon, as a gesture of “gratitude to Thailand.” The four terrorists released the six Israeli hostages at the Bangkok airport and boarded a Thai plane to Egypt. The Egyptian ambassador flew with them, guaranteeing their safety with his presence as he had promised. As the Thai DC
-8
flew to Cairo, five Israeli officers landed in Bangkok after twenty-four hours of travel. They were there to plan a rescue mission for an Israeli commando team that was on its way. Diplomatic negotiations allowing Sayeret Matkal commandos to operate in Thailand were ongoing. The Israeli government was ready to do all in its power to avoid another tragic end to a hostage situation.

The Black September attack on the Israeli embassy in Bangkok was quickly forgotten, both in Israel and abroad. The terrorists’ surrender to the Egyptian pressure was surprising. In Beirut, Ali Hassan Salameh was enraged by the operation’s failure. He wanted another attack that would put the Palestinian predicament back in the limelight, highlighting the importance of Fatah and Black September.

At Mossad headquarters, the search for assassination candidates continued at a frantic pace. A connection to Munich, direct or indirect, was not a prerequisite for consideration. At the time, many in the Mossad believed that those who preached violence were as bad as those who practiced or aided it; both were legitimate targets. In mid-January, Prime Minister Meir authorized another targeted killing, the third since Munich. Hussain Abu-Khair, thirty-six, the newly appointed PLO envoy to Nicosia, Cyprus, was sentenced to death. He too was a soft target: he lived in a hotel (he had been in Cyprus for two months but had yet to rent an apartment), had no weapon or bodyguard, and didn’t seem to fear bodily harm. A Caesarea surveillance team trailed him for close to two weeks without seeing any security detail, or any attentiveness on his part. Apparently he didn’t think he was important enough to warrant the attention of the Mossad.

Abu-Khair had served as Fatah liaison to the Soviet KGB. Since the late 1960s, Nicosia had been crawling with all kinds of cloak-and-dagger characters. No self-respecting spy agency dared to pass on sending an envoy to the region. Russian, American, East German, Spanish, British, Bulgarian, Syrian, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Israeli agents walked the streets of the shady capital. Many of them ran their Middle East missions from the island. Dodgy agents, traitors, double-dealers, backstabbers, and murderers played spy games on this sun-drenched island. Occasionally a bullet-riddled body would turn up. The Cypriot authorities chose not to interfere—which was, all nations tacitly acknowledged, the preferred response.

Abu-Khair returned to the Olympic Hotel on President Makarios Avenue just before midnight, January
25, 1973.
He had no idea that one of Zvi Malchin’s Keshet operatives had sneaked into his room and placed an explosive device beneath his bed. As was the case with Hamshari, this device could be remotely activated. A Caesarea combatant waited in a car outside the hotel for word from the surveillance team that the mark had entered his room. He saw Abu-Khair’s light flick on and off. The combatant gave him a minute to grope for his bed in the dark and then flipped the switch. The ensuing explosion ripped the man apart. Harari, who had been supervising the mission from a nearby hotel room, left the country along with his staff officers and the assassination team; they were back in Israel within hours.

That morning, the telephone had woken Ankie Spitzer. An unidentified man ordered her to listen to the news at 10 o’clock.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “This is for Andrei.”

He hung up.

The news announced that a mysterious explosion had killed the Fatah representative in Nicosia. Ankie would receive more such calls in the future.

The following day, R., Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, opened a cabinet in his room on the eleventh floor of the Hadar Dafna Building. Inside was a row of photographs—Abu-Khair’s was lined up just to the right of photos of Hamshari and Zu’aytir. R. drew an X through the photo of Abu-Khair. Harari watched R. work. We’re on a roll, he thought. Many other photos sat propped to the left of Abu-Khair’s. Who was next in line?

Individual Caesarea combatants executed missions. They were the ones the politicians alluded to when they waved their hands in the air, trumpeting Israel’s ability to reach terrorists wherever they hid. But the aftershocks of Munich didn’t affect only the people in the Mossad, Shabak, and Military Intelligence: it transformed the agencies themselves, their habits and their ability to cooperate. Before Munich, each intelligence agency operated on its own, in virtual isolation. Now heads of divisions, units, and wings understood that egos and institutional rivalries had to be cast aside in favor of interagency cooperation. Aharon Yariv, advisor to the prime minister on terrorism, worked tirelessly to smooth the rough patches and create a positive atmosphere during the many tense interagency meetings.

When a direct, underground line was laid between Military Intelligence’s Branch 4 shacks and the Hadar Dafna Mossad Facha division—only three hundred yards away and, till then, a world apart—a breakthrough in cooperation was achieved. “It was a direct line, without operators or other barriers, which was also progress,” a senior Military Intelligence source told me. “We also thought of computerizing our personnel files in an attempt to solve the four-sided problem of matching a name to a person. Every Arab name has four components: his first name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, and his clan name. If you catch a piece of information about a person, but all you have is a first name and sometimes also a family name, it might be impossible to find out who he is. Back then you couldn’t cross-reference with the push of a button. It took endless research and thought to make a full name, but it was worth it because the name is the building block, the first step toward cracking a case. A full name led to many targets and operations. Back then we tried to computerize our personnel files but the technical problems were too great. We didn’t do it, but the possibility of cooperation was something new and worthwhile.”

The agencies were not ready for total cooperation, however. “In early 1973 I went to Aharon Yariv with a detailed plan to construct a command center, maybe we would call it ‘Terror War Room,’” my source said. “It would be open twenty-four hours a day and it would serve and be run by all of the intelligence agencies. Yariv looked at me with those blue eyes and after a few beats of silence said, ‘What you’re proposing is totally impossible. We should make it happen, but we won’t; we’re not there yet.’”

Military Intelligence was used to anticipating war. They carefully watched army maneuvers and troop movements across the hostile countries to the north, east, and south. But after Munich Lieutenant Colonel Mor began issuing a weekly Hostile Terror Activity Report, known in Hebrew as Facha, an acronym that has become part of the everyday vocabulary. The weekly report went to the prime minister, the chief of staff, the defense minister, the head of Military Intelligence, the Shabak, and the Mossad. It included new alerts for pending terrorist attacks, statistics on terrorist activity, analysis of collected information, and, occasionally, a detailed indictment of suspected terrorists.

A senior intelligence source told me, “Our blood was boiling. Everything that pertained to terrorism was hot. We were on an assignment given to us directly by the prime minister. Sometimes pressure from the operational branches bent the will of the analysts. It’s not that they said target X is worthless and we still decided to kill him, but when there was information implicating someone we didn’t inspect it with a magnifying glass.