Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (14 page)

“You didn’t need blood on your hands for us to assassinate you. If there was intelligence information, the target was reachable, and if there was an opportunity, we took it. As far as we were concerned we were creating deterrence, forcing them to crawl into a defensive shell and not plan offensive attacks against us. But in this field there is also a slippery slope. Sometimes decisions are made based on operational ease. It’s not that the assassinated were innocent, but if a plan existed, and those were often easiest for the soft targets, you were condemned to death.”

23
                  
THE SHADOW WARS CONTINUE

MADRID, CAFÉ MORRISON FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 1973, 0900H

Baruch Cohen, a talented
katsa,
arrived in Israel for a short visit in January 1973. He had been stationed in Brussels, Belgium, for the past two years. The risks he took working undercover left him frayed. A chance encounter with an old friend prompted him to reveal what had been weighing on his mind for months. “I die inside every time I think that my kids might grow up without their father.” Two weeks later, on January 26, this father of four was killed in Madrid. One of his veteran sources, a Palestinian turncoat who had been “flipped” back by Black September, lured him to his death.

Baruch Cohen was thirty-six years old when he was killed. His family had lived in Haifa for five generations; he spoke Arabic with his parents and felt at ease in an Arab home. At twenty-three, one year after his army service, he joined the Shabak, working as a case officer in the field. He did his best work in Nablus’s
casbah
and the surrounding refugee camps, eventually rising to the position of station chief. All the locals recognized him, calling him Captain. Tzomet requested his services in 1970, recognizing that beyond his natural talents as a charismatic and confidence-inspiring case officer, his familiarity with the territories and Palestinian life in general would help him recruit homesick students abroad.

The Palestinian cream of the crop was educated in Europe. There, the shock of the West brought insularity. Students shared apartments and dorms, shopped at the same stores, and hung out at the same nightclubs. Amidst the uncovered women and the bland food, they carved out their own world. For Fatah’s Black September and the Marxist Palestinian terror organizations this was fertile ground for recruitment. The students who joined their ranks—often just looking for a familiar environment—were an integral part of Palestinian terror organizations’ European infrastructures.

In 1972, there were approximately six thousand Palestinians in West Germany (out of
55,000
Arabs total), the majority of them students. The situation in Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia was similar. One Palestinian agent, in an interview on September
25, 1972,
in Beirut with James Bell of
Time
magazine, explained, “We are everywhere now. We are all over Western Europe, and there are many Palestinians among the
12,000
Arab students in the U.S. We have our own businesses like a diplomatic nightclub in Rome, which the authorities closed last April. But there are a lot more. There are travel agencies that can arrange things. There are laundries and grocery stores. But of course, these businesses are not solely businesses. They are also collection agencies, mail drops, meeting places, points of contact.”

The Mossad fished from the same irresistible pond. While the Palestinian resistance groups used homesickness and patriotism as their lures, the Mossad baited with cash. Poor people were more likely to listen to an offer. Tzomet received a steady stream of information from the Shabak about the families of students pursuing degrees abroad. They knew which side of the law they were on; who their friends were; where they stood on nationalism and religion; and how much money their family had under the floorboards.

Cohen didn’t stumble for words when he first approached a potential source. He would role-play for days, rehearsing dozens of possible scenarios. He would never introduce himself as an Israeli. A man would betray his homeland for the right reason, but giving information to a Zionist was the greatest possible treason. Cohen would say he worked for NATO or Spain or Egypt. He would inquire about the health of his target’s family, asking specifically about an elderly relative. He would know if his target was gay, sex-starved, homesick, or in debt. He would find out if the person had a lifelong desire and then dangle it before his eyes. He would know if his mother was sick and offer a cure—perhaps admittance to a European hospital—in exchange for just a few short answers. He would have an abundance of Middle Eastern cakes and cookies on hand. He would play popular music. If he thought it would help relax his target, he would step out of a hotel room and a one-hundred-dollar-an-hour hooker would walk in. Baruch Cohen’s job was to read and rule the mind of his source. All he wanted was to have a little talk.

In the summer of 1970 Cohen moved with his wife, Nurit, and his four children, the youngest of whom, Michal, was four, to Brussels. The Belgian capital was his base, but he traveled all across the continent. On light workweeks he would leave his family on Monday, returning on Friday for Sabbath. He spent time at the universities and cafés frequented by young Palestinians. There were other
katsa
s working parallel beats, artfully persuading individuals to betray their people, exposing themselves to immense risk.

Since Munich, Cohen and his peers in Tzomet were under pressure to recruit as many sources as possible. The gap between what was needed to create a map of Palestinian terrorism in Europe and what they knew was vast. There was no starker example than the Munich Massacre, a high-profile attack Israel knew nothing about. Fatah had been on the offensive since early 1972, striking hard and often at Israeli targets abroad. Their attacks were bold and aimed at Israel’s weakest points. The HUMINT produced by Cohen and his peers was Israel’s first line of defense. They were the ones charged with blocking the terrorists’ advances. Despite the Mossad’s assassination campaign, highly motivated terrorists were not—or not yet—in short supply. The only way to stop them was by foiling their plans through superior knowledge.

On the eve of his death, Cohen called his wife in Brussels and told her that he would be a day late. “I’ll be back on Friday, before Shabbat, around six,” he said. Nurit did not know where he was calling from, or what false name he was living under. After more than ten years of marriage to a man in the secret service she knew not to probe. Occasionally when he returned to Brussels, she would let curiosity get the better of her, and would ask where he had been. Cohen would grunt out the name of a place—London, Vienna, Berlin. She never went further, never asked: and what did you do there?

The next morning, in downtown Madrid, Cohen met Samir, a Palestinian student and Fatah activist he had cultivated as a reliable source, at Café Morrison, on Calle José Antonio. As they were leaving the café two men suddenly approached them. Cohen’s informant broke into a run. Cohen understood what was happening, but had no time to react. Three quick rounds slammed into his chest. A fourth, errant bullet hit a pedestrian. Cohen collapsed on the sidewalk, in a pool of his own blood, his internal organs ruptured. The two gunmen escaped with the double agent. Passersby dispersed in a flash. The Madrid police arrived on the scene minutes later. An ambulance carried Cohen to the Francisco Franco Hospital, where he died on the operating table.

That evening Black September published a notice heralding the assassination of an Israeli Mossad agent by the name of Uri Molov. The Israeli passport Cohen carried in his pocket said Moshe Hanan Yishai. Initial media reports stated an Israeli citizen by that name had been murdered in Madrid. Since the state of Israel and Spain, under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, had no official ties, the Israelis preferred that Cohen’s real name be kept secret. Only when the corpse was returned to Israel did the government publicize his identity. The prime minister’s office issued an obituary for Cohen.

The media interpreted Cohen’s murder as Black September’s revenge for Zu’aytir, Hamshari, and Abu-Khair. The connection was coincidental. Black September’s mission to assassinate Cohen had been devised months before. It was about feasibility, not retribution.

The officers at Tzomet headquarters in Tel Aviv were devastated. In the four months since the attempt on Tzadok Ofir’s life, Tzomet had been scrambling to protect its officers abroad. Its plan called for each meeting between a
katsa
and his source, anywhere in the world, to be watched by a trained bodyguard. This logistically complex procedure would take a year to implement fully. Cohen fell between the cracks. His source, Samir, was considered reliable, which made their meeting a low priority.

The man who betrayed Cohen was put on the Mossad hit list and marked for death.

More than a decade later a Mossad officer tracked Samir down in Tunis. He walked past his house. The head of the Mossad at the time did not authorize his assassination. It was too risky.

24
                  
ASSASSINATION IN KHARTOUM

KHARTOUM, SUDAN, SAUDI EMBASSY MARCH 1, 1973, 2100H

Fatah had not lost sight of enemy number one—the Jordanian king and his regime. As Palestinian terror swept across Europe, Fatah officials in Beirut drafted an audacious plan to overthrow Jordan’s King Hussein. The plan called for thirty-two terrorists—an unprecedented number—to storm the office of the Jordanian prime minister and take him and several government ministers hostage. Then they would booby-trap all the exits with explosives. With the hostages trapped and under their control, they would demand the release of one thousand of their compatriots rotting in Jordanian jails. The king would be ambushed and killed on his way to the exchange site. Abu-Daoud, the mastermind behind the Munich attack, was chosen by Abu-Iyad to command the mission. Their goal: to destabilize the Hashemite state and claim it as their own.

In February 1973, Abu-Daoud arrived in Amman, Jordan, carrying forged papers and dressed as a wealthy Saudi sheik. He was accompanied by a young woman posing as one of the rich sheik’s wives. The Jordanian intelligence service, one of the world’s best in gathering HUMINT, followed them closely from the moment they entered the country. Days later the pair were stopped at what seemed like a random roadblock. It was a trap. The two were taken into custody and interrogated immediately. A Jordanian intelligence source, a high-ranking Fatah member, had informed his handlers that Abu-Daoud was on his way to Jordan to case the prime minister’s office.

Abu-Daoud broke under interrogation, revealing all the details of the planned coup. Abu-Daoud also spoke freely about the Munich attack, telling British TV reporters and Jordanian radio all about the perfectly planned strike. Black September was dealt a triple blow: not only had their most ambitious plan to date been thwarted, but an unidentified mole, somewhere in the upper echelons of their command structure, continued to operate, unobstructed. Fatah’s Black September leaders in Beirut and Damascus felt like their every move was being watched by the Jordanians. In addition, their top operational guy was captured. At the close of a swift military trial Abu-Daoud was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Abu-Iyad, both friend and commander to Abu-Daoud, was prepared to do anything in his power to bring the Jordanian wheels of justice to a halt. He hastily planned and authorized a deadly attack. On the first of March, seven Palestinian terrorists, armed with AK
-47
s, grenades, and pistols, left Beirut for Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Ten hours later, they stormed the Saudi embassy while the ambassador hosted a party for George C. Moore, the homeward-bound American deputy chief of mission. Guests poured out of the house, escaping through the garden as the terrorists charged through the front gate. Within minutes the group controlled the building. The commander of the raid sorted through the captives and kept only the most valuable: Cleo A. Noel, American ambassador to Sudan; George C. Moore; Guy Eid, the Belgian chargé d’affaires; and his Jordanian and Saudi counterparts.

The terrorists’ list of demands was familiar: the Germans must release a number of Baader-Meinhof operatives; the Americans, Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian murderer of Robert F. Kennedy; the Israelis must free a host of prisoners, including the two women captured during the Sabena takeover; and, finally, the Jordanians were required to open the death row cell of Mohammed Oudeh, aka Abu-Daoud. If their demands were not met the hostages would be shot.

Golda Meir, King Hussein, and U.S. president Richard Nixon refused to bargain with the terrorists. Nixon delivered a televised address, announcing that the United States would not bow to extortion. Thirty-six hours later, without any prior communication, the terrorists rounded up the two U.S. diplomats and their Belgian counterpart and executed them in the basement of the embassy. Each man was shot dozens of times. Twenty-four hours later the terrorists released the two Arab diplomats and surrendered to Sudanese forces.

The tight timetable for the operation had taken its toll; Black September had made many uncharacteristic mistakes. The Sudanese president, Colonel Jaafar Numeiry, furious that an attack had taken place in his capital city, sent officers to comb through the PLO offices in Khartoum. They found that Fawwaz Yassin, the head of the PLO mission, had fled the country hours before the attack, leaving behind a sketch of the Saudi embassy that he himself had made. Further: an official PLO Land Rover had been used to drive the terrorists to the embassy, and the commander of the attack was in fact the PLO’s number two man in Khartoum.

The investigation’s findings—which were highly publicized—proved that Black September and Fatah were inextricably linked, that the former was merely an unofficial arm of the latter. Many branches of American and European intelligence agencies were forced to reckon with this uncomfortable fact after Khartoum. The Sudanese investigation also proved that PLO diplomats, contrary to beliefs widely held at the time, did not abstain from terror attacks and did not confine their area of operations to Israel and the Occupied Territories. They worked as
saya’an
s and were quite willing to dirty their hands for the cause. These revelations damaged Fatah’s image abroad—they could no longer be seen simply as freedom fighters taking up arms solely against their Israeli occupiers. Killing unarmed diplomats in a basement did not play well in the international media. The week after the murder of the diplomats
Time
magazine published an article about the incident. It was titled “A Blacker September.”