Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (2 page)

Early in 1992, Shavit called a former protégé, the current head of Caesarea, to a short meeting. He asked him to check which of the terrorists involved in the Munich attack were still alive. Shavit was old-school, one of those who refused to close the book on Munich. As far as he was concerned, the state of Israel had painted a well-deserved target on the faces of everyone involved in the planning or the execution of the massacre. They would all pay with their lives; when and where was of no consequence. Mossad combatants were charged with carrying out the assassination orders, which had been passed down from Golda Meir to each successive prime minister.

Shavit believed in Israel’s responsibility to its citizens, at home and abroad—he believed in the necessity of fulfilling this executive order not just because he saw it as moral and just, but because he knew that no one else would carry it out in his place. He would do all in his power to see the mission through.

A few months after the assassination, Shavit was officially invited to meet the newly appointed head of the DST. Forgoing pleasantries, the French intelligence officer fired his opening volley: “We know you killed Bseiso. We’re still working on the proof. When it comes through, you’ll get what’s coming to you. In no way am I willing to allow you to turn Paris into your stage for acts of war and assassinations. We’re not going back to the early seventies, when you did whatever the hell you wanted here. I will not allow it to happen,” he said, pounding his fist on the table.

Shavit was impassive. “Point taken,” he said coolly, running his hand through his thinning, slicked-back hair, and then sipping from an espresso he’d been served earlier. Shavit knew there was no chance the French would find anything that would tie Israel to the assassination. The mission had gone without a hitch. Without a flicker of emotion he bid his colleague farewell, and left the office of the chief commander of the DST.

The Israeli action could not go unpunished; it was a sharp embarrassment, a stinging slap in the face to the French government. The Mossad is convinced that the French responded by deliberately leaking the name of a high-ranking Palestinian source in Arafat’s Tunis office. The agent, Adnan Yassin, had been working for the Mossad for years, informing them of all that transpired in the office and among the Diaspora Palestinian leadership. In October 1993, Yassin was arrested, and never heard from again. In addition, the French alerted the Palestinians to the presence of Mossad listening devices that had been placed in antique French furniture the PLO had received as a gift from Yassin. The French retribution handicapped Israel during the sensitive negotiations leading up to the Oslo Accords in 1993.

Three different, but often intertwined, factors come into play when a state decides to carry out an assassination—prevention, deterrence, and revenge. The role of prevention is clear—killing a known terrorist can prevent the next attack, most demonstrably in the case of an imminent “ticking bomb.” And in certain instances, the well-timed assassination of a terrorist leader can seriously wound an organization, hindering its ability to function indefinitely.

Deterrence is a more complex factor. Essentially, its goal is to violently persuade those considering a career in terrorism to choose a different vocation. Undoubtedly some do. “We’ll never know how many,” a former high-ranking Mossad officer told me, smiling contentedly. True, but the ultimate effectiveness of deterrence-by-assassination is open to question.

Deterrence is often woven together with the third factor, revenge and punishment. The aim here is to make it clear that he who hurts us, as an organization, as a people, will forever walk around in fear of a sudden, unprepared-for death. But there is an added tactical value: terrorists who are constantly looking over their shoulder in fear for their lives are less preoccupied with executing terror.

Decision makers and heads of intelligence services the world over will vehemently deny succumbing to revenge’s ancient allure, with its biblical demand for an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Yet revenge, to differing degrees, has played a role in each and every assassination carried out in Israel’s name, throughout its history. The same can be said for democracies like Britain, France, and the United States. Usually, “revenge” is not spoken of openly. Different, softer words are used, words that people can live with; phrases like “closing the circle.”

Revenge and punishment are part of a government’s decision-making process. For instance, the ongoing hunt for Osama Bin Laden. To what degree is the search for the
9/11
mastermind based on the need for prevention or deterrence? Now that numerous Bin Laden clones have arisen, to what extent is the hunt driven by a desire for revenge and punishment?

In the case of Atef Bseiso, revenge was served cold, twenty years after the crime. Bseiso joined a list of more than a dozen people killed by Israel in the wake of the Munich attack. Bseiso, the last of them, closed the circle.

2
                  
A YEAR OF TERROR

ISRAEL, LOD INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
MAY 9, 1972, 1610H

Terrorism hit an awful peak in 1972. Palestinian groups, frustrated by their failure to execute attacks against Israel from the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, exported their activities beyond the boundaries of the Middle East. Throughout 1972, a record number of high-profile attacks were carried out against Israelis and Jews. The Palestinians’ daring offensive incorporated many forms of violence. They hijacked planes, assassinated Israeli diplomats, and sent letter bombs all across the European continent. As a result of their actions, the plight of the Palestinian people began to seep into the world’s collective consciousness. Terrorism—their chosen method—was proving successful. Each deadly attack raised the ante. Operations grew bolder, more sophisticated, more theatrical.

On May
8, 1972,
Belgian Sabena Flight 571 was en route from Brussels, via Vienna, to Tel Aviv. On board were ten crew members and ninety passengers, sixty-seven of them Jewish. Also on board were four members of Black September, an amorphous branch of Fatah. The terrorists (two men and two women) were armed with hand grenades, a revolver, and two five-pound explosive devices. In the late afternoon, as the plane flew over the Greek island of Rhodes, the commander of the terrorist cell quietly made his way to the pilot’s wide-open cabin door. He pulled out a loaded gun and ordered the pilot to land the plane in Tel Aviv—a wildly daring move, considering that Israel’s premier counterterrorist unit, Sayeret Matkal, was five miles from Israel’s international airport. The terrorist grabbed the PA system and introduced himself: “This is Captain Kamal Rifa’at, your new captain . . . .”

In a quick phone consultation, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, the hero of the 1967 Six Day War, and Golda Meir, prime minister, decided to allow the aircraft to land at Lod International Airport. It touched down and was immediately escorted to the far end of the tarmac. Within hours, top military brass convened at the airport terminal. Defense Minister Dayan and Transportation Minister Shimon Peres were joined by Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff Lieutenant General David Elazar and several other IDF generals, including the head of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Yariv, and Major General Ariel Sharon (who later served as defense minister and, from 2001, as prime minister). Dayan directed Victor Cohen, head of the interrogation branch of the Shabak, Israel’s internal secret service, to conduct spurious negotiations with the terrorists. Dayan and Meir had no intention of yielding to their extortionate demands—to free 315 convicted Palestinian terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails—Dayan just wanted to deprive the terrorists of sleep.

Next, Dayan summoned Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s elite anti-terror unit, commanded by Ehud Barak. (In twenty-seven years Barak too would become prime minister.) Dayan instructed the unit to cripple the plane and rescue the hostages. Shortly thereafter, Barak and his officers began to practice storming an identical Boeing 707 on a nearby runway on the far side of the airport, while mechanics were rendering the hijacked plane unable to fly.

Victor Cohen’s negotiations, conducted over the plane’s radio system, kept the hijackers up all night, as they reiterated their demand that Israel open the gates of its prisons. On May 9, at 0900 hours
,
after more than ten hours of continuous negotiations, Cohen succeeded in convincing Rifa’at to send the pilot out with a sample of their explosives, to show to the Israelis. Cohen was playing the good cop as he argued that he needed to convince the one-eyed defense minister Dayan—that feared warrior—how lethal Black September’s intentions in fact were. Pilot Reginald Levy, traveling to Israel to celebrate his fiftieth birthday together with his wife, provided Israel’s security forces with critical details: the number of hijackers, their physical appearance, the contours of the black packages—probably explosive devices—they clutched. He confirmed that there were no seats next to the emergency exits of the plane, a matter of supreme importance to Barak and his staff officers, who knew that success hinged on surprise and speed. Levy returned to the hijackers and reported that Dayan had agreed to their terms. The 315 Palestinian prisoners would be delivered to the airport, and from there sent on to Cairo. Flight 571 would meet them in the Egyptian capital and the hostages would be freed. First, a technical team of mechanics would repair the aircraft.

Sixteen commandos from Sayeret Matkal, dressed as El Al mechanics in white jumpsuits, approached the plane. They gathered near the emergency exits of the aircraft and along the wings and, in a synchronized assault, burst inside. They immediately killed the two male hijackers and apprehended the two females, inadvertently killing one hostage in the process. The Israeli commandos had taken control of the plane in ninety seconds. The astonishing operation, the first of its kind, soon echoed around the world. A wave of pride washed over Israel. Israeli ingenuity, many felt, could conquer all.

That feeling didn’t change, even though three weeks after the Sabena mission a devastating attack occurred at Israel’s Lod Airport. Three men, members of the Japanese Red Army, a Marxist terrorist group, had volunteered to act under the auspices of the left-wing terror organization the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), and carry out the attack. Their goal: to murder as many people as possible, thereby garnering maximum worldwide exposure. They arrived in Israel on an Air France flight from Paris. They went through passport control, claimed their bags, and withdrew AK
-47
assault rifles and grenades. Then they opened fire and lobbed hand grenades at the dense crowd waiting nearby. In the chaos that ensued, two of the attackers were killed, probably by one of their own grenades. The third terrorist, Kozo Okamoto, fled. He made it to the tarmac and was captured alive. (He would be sentenced to life behind bars, but was released fourteen years later as part of a prisoner exchange.) Okamoto and his accomplices killed twenty-four people and injured seventy-two. Several of the victims were Puerto Rican pilgrims.

As the pitiless campaign waged by Palestinian terrorists against the state of Israel unfolded, it exerted a far-reaching influence on the development of terrorism worldwide. International terrorist organizations such as the Japanese Red Army, Baader-Meinhof, and the Armenian ASALA watched and learned as the Palestinians expanded the repertoire of murder, attempting previously undreamt-of missions. And the Palestinian mastery of terror’s twin purposes—propaganda and fear—helped lodge their stateless predicament in the minds of world leaders.

But the worst was yet to come. The failure of the Sabena hijacking increased the resolve of Black September’s leadership. They were determined to pull off an unprecedented, earthshaking attack—a theater of terror that would burn itself into the world’s collective consciousness for generations. They chose the Munich Olympics, to be held in August and September of 1972, as their grand stage.