Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (20 page)

Oslo papers raised the possibility of a connection between the arraignment of four foreigners with foreign passports—Patricia Roxburgh, Leslie Orbaum, Marianne Gladnikoff, and Dan Art—and the shooting in Lillehammer. The initial reports were unclear, unable to explain how the four detainees were connected to the murdered man. Some raised the possibility that it was a drug deal gone wrong.

On Sunday morning, Dan Art, an Israeli of Danish origin who went by the name Dan Arbel in Israel, was taken into custody. He was using his real passport while fulfilling an auxiliary role in the Mossad mission. He was recruited for this mission at the last minute, brought on board because of his command of the language, a skill the Caesarea combatants lacked. He could read the street signs, verify addresses over the telephone, order hotel rooms, rent cars, and find suitable safe houses. Marianne Gladnikoff, a Swedish Jew who had been picked by Caesarea’s human resources division shortly after she moved to Israel—and had been suggested as a suitable candidate for support and logistical operations in Scandinavian countries—was arrested along with Art/Arbel. The two were stopped at the Pornavo Airport returning the team’s rental cars. They had no cover story prepared and failed to explain why they were driving cars with plates the police were looking for (the two cars had been spotted at a roadblock speeding out of Lillehammer—and struck an officer as suspicious). Neither of the two was a Mossad combatant. They talked as soon as they were taken in for questioning. The information they provided led to the arrest of two senior members of the surveillance unit. The veteran agents were traveling undercover as British citizen Leslie Orbaum and Canadian citizen Patricia Roxburgh.

Leslie Orbaum was none other than Avraham Gemer, staff officer and head of the unit. He was a tough and stubborn man who did not cooperate with the investigators and stuck to his hole-ridden cover story, that he was British citizen Orbaum, aged twenty-nine, a teacher and librarian from Leeds, vacationing in Norway.

“Your name can’t be Leslie Orbaum,” the police investigator charged. “This man doesn’t exist. We checked thoroughly.”

“So I don’t have a name,” Gemer answered angrily.

Patricia Roxburgh, the woman taken into custody, was actually Sylvia Rafael. She was a Caesarea combatant who had participated in numerous operations in Europe, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. An attractive thirty-six-year-old Jew, Rafael was born in Capetown, South Africa. She was an amateur photographer. In 1963, she arrived in Israel; by 1965, she had been recruited by Caesarea’s human resources department. Her skills as a combatant were evident from the start. She was calm, quick-witted, and trustworthy. She was the type of woman who could mingle in any society and engender a feeling of security and trust. Rafael preferred to keep her independence, though: she did not join the Mossad full-time, choosing to participate only in certain missions. Caesarea kept her close at hand and requested her services often. Her hobby had served her well on numerous occasions. Using a Canadian or South African passport, she presented herself as a freelance reporter and photographer scouring the area for a juicy story.

Rafael claimed to be a Canadian freelance journalist on vacation who happened to meet Leslie Orbaum, an old acquaintance, by chance, at the Zurich airport. On the spot the two decided to travel to Norway for a vacation. There they met Art/Arbel and Gladnikoff and decided to share an apartment with them.

The investigators were not convinced. There were serious contradictions in the four versions of events the detainees recounted. They could not corroborate the details of the time they lived together.

When the Oslo police searched Dan Art’s belongings they found documents with a phone number that led to the arrest of two additional Israelis, Zvi Steinberg and Michael Dorf, who were staying in the private residence of Yigal Eyal, security officer for the Israeli embassy in Oslo. The two men were logistics and communications agents for the Mossad. They had found temporary shelter in the security officer’s apartment. In Steinberg’s coat pocket, the police found a first-class train ticket from Oslo to Copenhagen, set to leave at 2210 hours that night. As they searched through Steinberg’s and Dorf’s suitcases and personal items, more incriminating evidence was discovered. The Caesarea agents had been negligent during the final stages of the operation. With Dorf and Steinberg arrested, the number of detained Israelis rose to six.

Caesarea’s grand pretensions were unveiled during the investigation of the shaky Dan Art/Arbel, a claustrophobic, and Marianne Gladnikoff, the junior agent. Blindly determined, the Mossad had arrived in drowsy Lillehammer and assassinated a man whom they mistakenly took for a Palestinian terrorist. The police investigation and the detainees’ testimonies revealed the incompetent, unprofessional behavior of many team members. Caesarea’s senior officers had a raging desire to complete the mission at any cost, which caused them to act without even a minimal amount of caution. They were arrogant, reckless, overconfident, and stubborn. Their fundamental mind-set flaws were the main reason the wrong man died and the mission was exposed. Mike Harari and the two assassins managed to escape by the skin of their teeth. Only by chance did they avoid being caught.

The Israeli government was unsure how to handle the arrest of the six Mossad operatives in Norway. One of Golda Meir’s worst nightmares had come true. There were long conversations about the right way to respond. The basic question: should Israel take responsibility for the assassination or try to distance itself? As in the past (in several incidents in Arab countries), the government in Jerusalem chose to take the middle path. Without publicly acknowledging their role in sending the team, the government sent Foreign Ministry legal advisor Meir Rosenne to Norway, and shortly thereafter, Eleazar Palmor, a Foreign Ministry official who was appointed special advisor to the embassy. The government ordered Palmor to follow the trial closely, establish connections with local legal bodies, and tend to the needs of the detainees.

In Golda Meir’s office in Jerusalem, Zvi Zamir and Mike Harari turned in their resignations in the presence of her military aide, Yisrael Lior. She refused to accept them. “There are people in jail,” she said. “You can’t get up and leave; there is work to be done.”

On Friday, four days after the episode was exposed, Meir sent Lior to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv, to check on Harari’s emotional and mental state. Harari did not blame himself for the mistake or the detention of six agents under his command. When asked about the embarrassing affair, he said, with an almost Clintonian eloquence, “I take responsibility upon myself, but not the guilt.” At other times, he said, “When the sharpest combatants succeeded, it was my success; when they failed, it was my failure.”

The six sat for a public trial, the focus of intense media coverage in Norway, Israel, and the rest of the world. Sylvia Rafael impressed reporters with her calm appearance and witty demeanor. When Avraham Gemer was called to the witness stand, he sat there a short while, stubborn and distracted. Only Dan Art/Arbel appeared shocked and afraid. He wrung his hands nervously as he explained his reasons for joining the “Scandinavian mission.” He said that the operation appealed to him because his expenses were paid and he had just purchased a new house in Israel, which he wanted to furnish. Asked the prosecutor: “Did you really believe that Israel would step in to assist an illegal group working in Norway?” Answered Art/Arbel: “To tell you the truth, because of the good relations between Norway and Israel, I thought that the issue would be solved in private between the two nations. It was my innocence that made me think like that.” Arbel said on the stand that he had given the Oslo police investigators a number in the Hadar Dafna Building in Tel Aviv
—256-230—
so that they could confirm his story.

Avraham Gemer was incensed. Sensitive intelligence was being bandied about in public. He requested, by way of his representative, that the trial resume behind closed doors. The court agreed. Meanwhile, the reporters dashed out of the courtroom and ordered the operator to connect them to
256-230
in Tel Aviv. A recording with a message in English said, “This number is no longer connected.”

On February
1, 1974,
the six were sentenced. Michael Dorf, a communications and codes agent, was the only one found not guilty and released. The five other Israelis were found guilty and sentenced as follows: Zvi Steinberg, logistical agent for the operation, was sentenced to one year in prison for gathering information for a foreign country; Marianne Gladnikoff was sentenced to two and half years for her involvement in the murder. Dan Art/Arbel was sentenced to five years for having secondhand knowledge of a premeditated murder. Avraham Gemer and Sylvia Rafael were sentenced to five and a half years for their involvement in the murder. The court found that all six played minor roles in the shooting of Bouchiki, when compared to the assassins and the operational planners who had managed to escape.

The bitter mistake that cost the waiter, Achmed Bouchiki, his life, weighed like a millstone on the shoulders of the state of Israel. It had long-lasting effects on Israel—in its relations with Norway and with other nations, as it was suddenly seen as a state carrying out its own brand of international terror.

For years, Israel denied responsibility for the incident. Only in January 1996 did Prime Minister Shimon Peres veer away from years of Israeli government policy. He sent a leading Israeli lawyer to Oslo to conduct compensation negotiations with the family of the murdered victim. Israel agreed to pay for the shooting of the father of the family without taking official responsibility for the act. The negotiations continued for but a few hours. An agreement was quickly reached, in which Israel expressed regret over the actions in Lillehammer and offered compensation to the family totaling almost $
400,000.

Thirty-one years after the court’s verdict, on a warm, clear winter day, veteran Caesarea combatants and staff officers attended the funeral of their friend, combatant Sylvia Rafael, who had lived for the past twenty years in South Africa with her partner, Norwegian lawyer Anneus Schodt, her defense attorney during the Oslo trial. During the long legal ordeal, they had fallen in love. He had left his family following her release from prison. On the afternoon of February
15, 2005,
she was buried in the small cemetery at Kibbutz Ramat Ha’Kovesh, which had adopted her during her incarceration. She was buried at age sixty-seven, in the heart of the fields and in the shade of cypress trees.

Dozens of friends, many of them with salt-and-pepper hair and walking sticks, stood around her grave. Three former heads of the Mossad came to pay their final respects. They stood around the grave. Mike Harari, Caesarea commander, the man responsible for the Lillehammer mission that landed her in jail, offered a eulogy: “Sylvia was a Caesarean of noble stock, who volunteered to be a combatant for the nation of Israel . . . . They say that those who don’t act, don’t make mistakes, and never have problems. We acted! We did so much and we succeeded. When we succeeded, they called us ‘professionals,’ ‘the hand of God,’ and more. And when we failed, they called us ‘
shlomeil
s.’ The truth is we weren’t
shlomeil
s, and we weren’t professionals. We simply fulfilled our mission to defend the nation of Israel.”

30
                  
CLOUDY SKIES SAVE ARAFAT

TEL AVIV, AIR FORCE OPERATIONS ROOM SPRING 1974

Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Mor picked up the scrambled phone. “Mor,” he said, tight for time, preoccupied by the dozens of raw intelligence reports that had landed on his desk since early morning. The person on the other end of the line was equally direct. “Initial, unchecked reports show that Arafat is at Fatah headquarters in Nabatiya, for a meeting with local commanders. We’ll be back in touch as necessary.”

Mor swallowed, no longer distracted by paperwork. “You sure it’s him?”

“That’s what it sounds like,” was the reply.

“Keep me updated,” Mor said before slamming down the phone. He pondered the news for two beats, then called the deputy commander of Military Intelligence. He relayed the facts as he had heard them.

“Come upstairs,” the colonel said.

The opportunity that had presented itself was clear to both of them—Yasser Arafat, chairman of the PLO and commander of Fatah, a man high on Israel’s hit list for years, was in south Lebanon, a few minutes’ flight time from Israel’s northern border. Mor walked into the colonel’s office and presented the facts: ten minutes ago Arafat seemed to have entered Fatah’s forward command center in Nabatiya, south Lebanon, five miles north of Israel’s border. There was no positive ID of the man. The only way they could be sure was to have a look at the parking lot of the house that served as their HQ—if it was lined with Mercedes-Benz cars and top-of-the-line Jeeps, they would know. A visit from Arafat would draw all of the area’s commanders. He did not visit the trenches that often; no one would miss the occasion.

Five minutes later, Mor and the colonel presented themselves outside the office of Chief of Staff David Elazar. They were escorted straight through. Elazar smiled when they entered. He knew both of them well. After a sixty-second presentation of the facts, the three of them left the office and walked through the door that led to the civilian half of the building, to the office of the defense minister. Although only thirty yards divided the two offices, the separation was kept stark and clear. Moshe Dayan listened to the news. “I’ll pass this on to Golda. Get ready. And get me some verification.” Before they turned from the room Dayan already had Golda on the phone. The conversation was over in seconds. He looked back at the uniformed men. “She authorized it. But she also demands verification that it’s him.”

The Chief of Staff sent Mor to “The Pit”—the air force control room dug several stories under the soft, sandy earth of the IDF headquarters. From there, Mor could supervise the mission. Moments later, an order was sent to the northern Ramat David airbase to arm a foursome of F
-4
Phantoms with quarter-ton bombs. From the runway to Nabatiya was seven minutes flight time. A single-engine surveillance aircraft was already in the air, heading north. The pilot of the slow-flying Cessna had received orders from the office of the chief of staff before they went to Dayan’s office. Each minute counted. The squadron’s best aerial reconnaissance man sat behind the pilot, studying Nabatiya as it appeared on long strips of aerial photos. His mission was to locate the parking lot and answer one simple question—empty or full? He did not know that Arafat was suspected of being present.

Mor looked at his watch agitatedly. His feet were bouncing, his back sweating. “I’m overseeing one of the most important missions in the history of the country—the mission to eliminate Yasser Arafat,” he thought to himself. Then he looked at the air force officer handling the mission from his end. He was all business, switching phones and radio receivers, issuing short and clear orders. It seemed to Mor that this officer and the other air force officers were too pressed for time to feel history in the making. After ten minutes of nerve-racking tension, the aerial reconnaissance man radioed, announcing calmly that he was over the borderline, five miles from the parking lot. “I have 8/8ths across the board,” he said. Everyone in the pit realized the implications. In meteorological terms 8/8ths describes the fraction of the sky covered by opaque clouds: visibility was nil.

Leaning back in his chair, Mor let out a deep, remorseful sigh. The room around him was filled with the sound of the air force officers folding up the special mission. What a shame, he thought to himself. Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, owed his life to 8/8ths cloud cover.

Assassination missions had fallen low on the Mossad and Military Intelligence list of priorities. The were two reasons for this. The first was the failure in Lillehammer. The debacle that resulted in the death of an innocent man and sent six Mossad operatives to jail led to the immediate cessation of assassination missions. The Mossad’s image had been tarnished at home and abroad. It was one of the Mossad’s toughest hours. Their confidence was shaken, their prestige tarnished.

Senior officers from within their ranks immediately began an in-house investigation. Caesarea and the Facha division, which supplied the initial faulty intelligence that led to the debacle, were called on to assist. The internal investigative committee prodded, poked, and probed. The report they handed in to Zvi Zamir detailed all aspects of the disastrous mission and the operational lessons to be learned from it.

But before the agency could learn any lessons a second blow was dealt: war. On October
6, 1973,
Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the Syrian and Egyptian armies coordinated a surprise invasion of Israeli-controlled territory on the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. The attack came under the guise of innocent border maneuvers. Israeli intelligence agencies had failed dismally in not seeing through the Egyptian-Syrian ruse.

There was a cessation of terror during the war, the Palestinian organizations waiting on the sidelines for the elimination of Israel. Military Intelligence’s Branch 4 was shut, its officers dispersed to different units until the end of the war, which would claim over
2,500
Israeli lives.

The inability to predict the war was a colossal intelligence failure, a nine on the Richter scale. The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry under the jurisdiction of Supreme Court Justice Shimon Agranat, which was set into motion to investigate the failure, kept the senior officers busy, as they exchanged accusations of culpability. Few senior officers escaped the fray. The committee’s findings were grave. Major General Eli Zeira, commander of Military Intelligence, and Lieutenant General David Elazar, the IDF’s Chief of Staff, were both forced to step down.

One of the few officers not involved in the squabble was Lieutenant Colonel Mor, who afterward did everything in his power to push for Mossad and IDF missions outside the country—like the one that fell into his lap when Arafat visited Nabatiya.

In September 1974 the top spot at the Mossad changed hands. Zvi Zamir, fifty-two, stepped down. Yitzhak Rabin, the new Prime Minister and former IDF Chief of Staff, a man untainted by the 1973 war, appointed his close friend Major General (ret.) Yitzhak Hofi. Hofi had shed his uniform two months earlier, after skillfully leading the Northern Command during the conflict. A cool-headed and conservative army man, he knew little of the Mossad’s ways. He took to learning all he could, while addressing the recommendations of the Agranat Commission, including, among other things, starting an independent intelligence analysis wing. In 1976 the Facha division was formed as an independent unit, separate from Tzomet, housing all branches of operational intelligence analysis under one roof. Caesarea, under the guiding hand of Mike Harari, was reorganized. New departments and new branches in the chain of command were put into place. Kidon, a small, secretive assassination unit, was created. Caesarea was renamed several times, but the old name never wore off—it endures today as a nickname.

Hofi served as head of the Mossad for eight years, from 1974 to 1982. As opposed to his predecessor, he felt no obligation to avenge the Munich Massacre. As far as he was concerned the terrible shock of war, to both the defense establishment and the civilian population, did not allow for the type of single-minded focus necessary to hunt down the perpetrators of Munich to the end. Munich-based retribution was downgraded among the Mossad’s priorities.

The primary mission for Hofi was rehabilitating and rebuilding the Mossad itself. Postwar reality demanded a shift in priorities. Manpower was diverted elsewhere. But terror attacks within Israeli cities meant the Mossad had to be prepared to respond. Only one and a half years after taking the reins, the cautious Hofi hesitantly authorized preventive assassinations in Europe and the Middle East. At first, the Munich perpetrators were not targeted. But that would change.