Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (5 page)

7
                  
CAPTURED

MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE, 31 CONNOLLYSTRASSE, APARTMENT 5 TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1972, 0415H

Shmuel Lalkin had always been a light sleeper. At 0415 hours he awoke in his bedroom on the second floor of Apartment 5 at 31 Connollystrasse, to the jolting sound of gunfire. He went to his front-facing window and looked out. Everything appeared quiet and peaceful in the early morning light. A chilly wind beckoned him back to bed. “Maybe a nervous sharpshooter unintentionally discharged a round,” he thought to himself. The exhaustion of the past few days weighed on his eyelids. He planned to wake up in less than two hours.

A few minutes earlier, the terrorists had reached the blue door leading to Apartment 1. It was open, as always, since it led not only to the Israeli dorms but also to the parking garage and the upstairs housing units. The terrorists walked through a small foyer to the door of Apartment 1, home to seven Israeli coaches and referees. The terrorists had a copy of the key. One of them slipped it into the door; the lock wouldn’t turn. The jiggling of the key woke Yossef Gutfreund, a six-foot-three,
285-
pound international wrestling referee. Gutfreund, forty, married, and the father of two young girls, had refereed at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Though he was a businessman by profession, the Romanian-born referee devoted much of his time to sports. He rolled out of bed and made his way toward the jarring noise.

The terrorists flipped the lock and opened the door. Gutfreund stood in the hall, barefoot, in his underwear, peering at the armed and masked men facing him. He immediately recognized the men’s intentions: Arab terrorists are coming to take us hostage. “Guys, run!” he shouted at his six sleeping roommates. Gutfreund threw the full weight of his body against the door. The terrorists, who realized they’d lost the element of surprise, pushed with all their strength. Gutfreund was an overpoweringly strong man, but the terrorists managed to wedge the steel barrel of a Kalashnikov between the door and the frame and use it as a crowbar. The former wrestler, knowing he could not hold them for long, struggled selflessly, buying time for his friends to come to their senses and escape. The only way out was through the back window.

The weight lifting trainer, Tuvia Skolsky, a Holocaust survivor who had lost his entire family on German soil, heard the sounds of Gutfreund’s desperate struggle. He bolted out of bed and into the living room, where he saw Gutfreund grappling with the half-open door. On the other side he clearly saw a man in a black ski mask prying the door open with his weapon. “I understood that I needed to escape immediately,” Skolsky, the only survivor from Apartment 1, said in his testimony. He yelled to his sleeping flatmates to run for their lives as he raced to the back window.

Everything happened quickly. Only ten seconds had passed from the moment Gutfreund blocked the door until Skolsky reached the window. The lock stuck. Skolsky knew his life was in immediate danger. Flustered and panicked, he punched through the thick double glass, cutting himself on the remaining shards as he threw himself out the window. He jumped to his feet and ran. By now the terrorists had overpowered Gutfreund. They charged into the room and began shooting at Skolsky through the broken window. “I could hear the bullets whistling past my ears,” he reported. He ran through the courtyard garden, barefoot, in his pajamas. He slipped behind the corner of the building and crouched down, stunned.

The gunfire that almost killed Skolsky was the same gunfire that roused Lalkin.

Back in Apartment 1, the terrorists herded the six hostages into a second-floor bedroom and began binding them with the precut rope they had brought with them. They marched Gutfreund to the corner of Apartment 1, keeping a weapon trained on his face. They yanked the other five from their beds: Amitzur Shapira, a forty-year-old track and field coach and father of four; Kehat Shorr, fifty-three, the marksmen’s coach; Andrei Spitzer, twenty-seven, the newly married fencing coach and father of a one-month-old daughter; Yaakov Springer, fifty, a weight lifting referee officiating at his fifth Olympic Games; and Moshe “Moni” Weinberg, thirty-three, the wrestling coach and father of a newborn son. Unlike the rest of them, Weinberg was not drowsy. He had just sneaked back into the apartment after a night out with friends in Munich. A strong man, used to close-quarter battle, Weinberg lunged at Issa, knocking him off his feet. But before he could grab his weapon, a second terrorist, acting instinctively, shot a single round that ripped through his right cheek. Blood poured from his mouth, staining his clothes and the floor beneath his feet. The terrorists pushed the hostages into Shorr and Spitzer’s room on the second floor. They were all bound at the wrists and ankles.

The men sat stunned on the two simple beds, most of them in their underwear. Issa and two of the masked men remained with the hostages, guns pointed at their heads. Tony, the second in command, and the four other terrorists took Weinberg with them and set out to find more Israelis. Outside they passed by Apartment 2, housing five Israeli track and field athletes, and charged into Apartment 3. Weinberg, bleeding, was forced to lead the terrorists through the apartment complex to the Israeli rooms, an AK
-47
at his back. Despite everything, he kept his head clear. Apartment 3 housed the wrestlers and the weight lifters. Weinberg, their coach, must have reasoned that the big boys had the best chance of overpowering the terrorists.

Tony and his men surprised the athletes who shared the two floors of Apartment
3:
David Berger, twenty-eight, American-born weight lifter; Eliezer Halfin, twenty-four, lightweight, Soviet-born wrestler; Mark Slavin, eighteen, Greco-Roman wrestler, also from the former Soviet Union and the youngest member of the Israeli delegation; Yossef Romano, thirty-two, middleweight, Libyan-born weight lifter, and father of three girls; Ze’ev Friedman, twenty-eight, a featherweight, Polish-born weight lifter; and Gad Tsabari, a light flyweight freestyle wrestler. The terrorists quickly pulled the athletes out of bed. Shouting and butting them with their weapons they corralled the Olympians in the living room on the first floor. While three of the terrorists kept the athletes under watch, one of them looked under beds and in closets for hiding Israelis. David Berger, who held a law degree from Columbia University, turned to his friends and whispered, in Hebrew, “Let’s charge them, we’ve got nothing to lose.” One of the terrorists caught the whisper and immediately slammed the barrel of his weapon into Berger’s back, shutting him up and stymieing, for the time being, any chance of a revolt.

Yelling and jabbing, the terrorists forced the athletes into a straight line with hands clasped on their heads. They marched them outside, back in the direction of Apartment 1. Wrestler Gad Tsabari, weighing less than 106 pounds, was first in line. As they walked through the blue door into the foyer of Apartment 1, one of the terrorists, a ski mask covering his face, directed Tsabari into the apartment with a jerk of his gun. “I was dazed and sweaty,” Tsabari recalled. “Without thinking too much I slapped aside the barrel of his weapon and ran outside.” He took the winding stairs down to the underground parking garage in giant leaps. One of the terrorists followed him down the stairs and fired a few quick shots in his direction. But Tsabari, who zigzagged and took cover behind the pillars of the building, remained unscathed.

Moshe Weinberg, the wrestling coach, stood farther down the line. He held a piece of cloth to his injured cheek as they marched outside the apartment complex. While Tsabari was running through the underground garage, Weinberg took advantage of the momentary distraction and made a move for one of the terrorist’s guns. His sudden movement alerted one of the other terrorists, who released a long burst of fire, stopping Weinberg in his tracks and ripping his chest apart. The remaining hostages were shoved into Apartment 1 without further incident. Less than ten minutes had elapsed.

The village woke up to the long, thumping burst of gunfire that killed Weinberg. Lights went on in rooms, heads poked out of windows. Lalkin jumped out of bed. The major now knew this was not accidental fire. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw beneath his window. On the sidewalk, outside Apartment 1, Weinberg lay lifeless, his clothes soaked in blood.

Lalkin looked to his right and saw Henry Hershkowitz, the flag bearer at the opening ceremony, gaping out the window of Apartment 2. The two of them watched an Oly make his way toward the building, walkie-talkie in hand. Minutes before, a call from a cleaning woman had alerted the authorities to the sound of gunfire. At 0450 hours the security shift manager sent a guard to check the scene. The guard saw Weinberg’s body splayed on the ground and one of the terrorists near the blue door. He turned to the armed terrorist for an explanation, but got no response. The unarmed Oly radioed back to headquarters, describing what he had seen.

Lalkin raced to the first-floor living room, to the only phone in all of the Israeli housing units. He knew part of his delegation had been seized and that at least one member was dead. He got an outside line and called the Sheraton Hotel, where all the Israeli journalists and Olympic officials were staying. “Call Israel!” he said. “Arab terrorists have taken part of our delegation hostage.”

Again, he looked out the window: several unarmed guards had congregated outside Apartment 1. He patted his hip, where the firearm he had been refused might have been resting. He thought for a moment how much safer he would feel if he had a gun. He rechecked the lock on the door and went back to the phone, maintaining his connection with the outside world. Remembering his son’s pleas to stay with the wrestlers in Apartment 3 brought a wave of nausea. He chased the thought from his mind.

Meanwhile, in the room where the hostages were being held, wrestler Yossef Romano, who had torn tendons in his knee and was using crutches, began to contemplate a desperate move. He had witnessed Weinberg’s attempt to seize a weapon, had seen him killed; nevertheless, he lunged at one of the terrorists, grabbing for his gun. He managed to put the terrorist flat on his back but was shot by another one of the hostage takers. Romano’s dead body was left in the center of the living room. Nine hostages remained.

The phone rang in Manfred Schreiber’s apartment shortly after 0500 hours
.
Schreiber, a solidly built man in his late forties, was the all-powerful chief of the Munich police, responsible for planning and running security at the Olympic Games. He immediately ordered the village guards to isolate the Israeli dorms and lock the gates to the village, preventing anyone from entering or leaving. He placed one call, to Bruno Merck, before leaving his house. Merck, the interior minister of Bavaria, contacted Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German interior minister. Within an hour, all of West Germany’s top officials had been updated. They were stunned, embarrassed, and, primarily, uncertain how to proceed.

Police were sent to the home of Olympic Village mayor Walter Troeger to wake him and escort him to the scene. The smooth politico was completely unprepared for what awaited him. Just after
5:30 A.M.
the authorities scooped Moshe Weinberg’s lifeless body off the sidewalk outside Apartment 1 and placed it in an ambulance. On September
5, 1972,
the people of Munich awoke to the sound of sirens and the rumble of dozens of military trucks. Flickering police lights painted the city blue at dawn.

The international media began issuing reports, mostly of an uncertain hostage situation in the Israeli housing units and one confirmed dead body that had been cast out into the street. In America, ABC held the exclusive television rights to the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. Their morning coverage began with sports reporter Jim McKay saying, “The Olympics of Serenity have become the one thing the Germans didn’t want it to be: the Olympics of Terror.”

Hundreds of reporters rushed to the scene, gathering bits of information and rumor. At first, Israeli journalists reported that sixteen to seventeen hostages had been taken. Later, the number was reduced to thirteen. Only when Tsabari and Skolsky together with the athletes in Apartment 2 were located could journalists report, with a degree of certainty, that there were ten Israeli hostages. Many hours would pass before the terrorists would reveal the second dead hostage. Even then, they refused to divulge the man’s identity or allow his body to be removed.

The terrorists released two pages of tight typewriter script, containing the names of the 236 prisoners whose release they demanded, 234 of whom were held in Israeli jails. Among them were Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese terrorist who had attacked passengers at Lod Airport, and the two Palestinian women who had carried out the Sabena hijacking. The additional two prisoners, the notorious urban guerrillas Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader of the left-wing Red Army Faction, were held in West German jails. The terrorists demanded that all the prisoners be released by
9:00 A.M.
and transported to an Arab country. Only after that would the Israeli hostages be freed. If their demands were not met, they would execute a hostage every hour.

Signed: BLACK SEPTEMBER.

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BUNGLED NEGOTIATIONS

MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE, 31 CONNOLLYSTRASSE TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1972, 0840H

The 0900 deadline was impossible to meet. The West German and Bavarian officials gathered in the basement of the G
-1
administration building in the Olympic Village were ill equipped to deal with a hostage situation. They had neither the time nor the know-how to craft an effective plan. The only task they addressed was forestalling the deadline. A Bavarian policewoman named Analiese Graes, who had volunteered to serve as an intermediary between Issa, the German-speaking terrorist leader, and the German officials, arranged a meeting outside Apartment 1.

At 0845 hours
,
Manfred Schreiber, the Munich police chief; Walter Troeger, the mayor of the Olympic Village; and Ahmed Damardash Touni, the Egyptian delegate to the International Olympic Committee, made their way up Connollystrasse to meet with Issa. A terrorist with a ski mask over his face and a Kalashnikov in his hand stood by the second-floor window and watched the German officials approach. Issa, in a cream-colored suit and an oversized white hat, immediately stepped out of the building to greet them. It was to be the first of many meetings.

Schreiber was impressed by Issa’s composure and his fluent German. “He expressed his demands succinctly, forcefully, calmly, and tirelessly,” he later said. Issa never showed his eyes. He was polite and, at times, friendly with the German officials, but behind his dark sunglasses, the wiry, chain-smoking terrorist clearly controlled the situation. He clutched a grenade in his hand at all times, ready to release the pin and kill them all at the first sign of trickery.

Troeger and Schreiber had no protocols to work from and no clue how to neutralize the situation. Touni, a native Arabic speaker, was asked to negotiate with Issa in the comfort of his mother tongue. He assured Issa that German and Israeli officials in Bonn and Jerusalem were looking into his demands, but they needed more time to process “the details.” Issa immediately extended the deadline till noon.

Schreiber, a veteran police officer used to dealing with an array of criminals, considered grabbing Issa and using him as a bargaining chip. Issa caught his roaming eyes. Lifting the grenade, he said, “If you lay your hand on me, I’ll blow us both to bits.” A move like the one Schreiber considered might have worked against a group of criminals committed to cash rather than a cause. But the Palestinians in Apartment 1 were devoted to an idea, not to one another. They would never have negotiated for Issa’s life. After all, it was he, in the train station, who had told them they were all martyrs for the Palestinian cause. And with him gone, they would have become more volatile, unpredictable, and difficult to deal with.

Throughout the hostage crisis the negotiating team showed their ignorance of the goals of ideological terrorists. Schreiber offered Issa “an unlimited amount of money” in exchange for the Israeli hostages. He suggested they set the sum. “This is not about money,” Issa replied with disgust. “Talk of money is demeaning.”

Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the portly, jowly West German interior minister, also failed to grasp the essence of the terrorists’ mission. “When it became clear to me that the negotiations were off course I said to the leader: ‘You know our history, you know what the Third Reich did to the Jews . . . . You need to understand that that can’t happen in Germany again.’ I told him to take me instead of them.” Genscher’s pleas fell on deaf ears.

At 1045 hours
,
Genscher, Merck, and Schreiber established an official crisis committee. The Federal Republic of Germany had no hostage negotiation team, and the men seemed lost, adrift, lacking in ideas, yet unwilling to accept advice. Ulrich Wagner, an eyewitness to the hostage crisis and an aide-de-camp to Genscher, later said, diplomatically, “At this time, we were, I think, a little bit naïve.” Weeks after the crisis, the federal government chose Wagner to establish and command the GSG
-9
anti-terror unit—an outright result of that naïveté.

Black September stood firm; for them there was no way back. The terrorists were willing to become
shuhada,
martyrs; in fact, it was an integral part of their plan. Troeger, who spoke with Issa at length, relayed his sentiment: “Either way we are dead. Either we will be killed here, or if we go out and give up without having hostages . . . we will be killed where we go.”

Troeger likened Issa and his men to the Japanese kamikazes of World War II. In the early 1970s, words like “martyr” were rarely heard in Europe and America. Suicidal terrorists weren’t commonplace. But the death-by-martyrdom notion was well entrenched in the Arab Muslim culture to which the terrorists belonged. Despite the fact that the armed Palestinian resistance was, at the time, secular and, to a large degree, under the spell of Marxist ideology, the Black September terrorists were devotedly suicidal.

The West German, Bavarian, and Olympic authorities had one goal: to remove this stain from their event as soon as possible and resume the Games. But as noon approached, the West German negotiating team was no closer to a solution than they had been six hours before. The Palestinian terrorists would not bend: they wanted prisoners released before they would begin to discuss freeing the hostages. The Israelis, led by Prime Minister Golda Meir, refused to bow to extortion. The negotiations, as an end in themselves, were futile.

The Germans also had to address Israel’s demands that the Games be halted until the end of the crisis. The West German authorities refused. The main events would go on. And so, as nine Israeli athletes sat in their Olympic dorm, hands and feet bound, thirsty, hungry, frightened, and sweaty, their friend’s body in a pool of his own dark blood, a host of assault rifles in their faces, three thousand fans gathered to watch Japan’s skilled volleyball team drub West Germany.

Neither the Olympic organizers nor the German officials thought this strange. Eventually, once Israeli pressure turned international, the IOC and the German authorities agreed to halt the Games briefly at 1530 hours and to hold a memorial ceremony for the two fallen athletes at ten the following morning. They had no way of knowing that the memorial would take place as planned, but for many more than two.