Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (9 page)

Ankie Spitzer was elated. After two decades of battling the German authorities, she finally had access to the truth. She was closer than ever to being able to reconstruct the final hours of her husband’s life.

Once the authenticity of the documents had been verified, Spitzer demanded that the federal government provide her with full access to the archive. The government refused. After several TV appearances, a political storm erupted in Germany. During one dramatic debate, Spitzer, speaking live from Tel Aviv, confronted the Bavarian justice minister, who denied the existence of any official archives; Spitzer produced a sheaf of papers and began quoting from the official ballistic reports.

The German opposition party demanded the release of the information. The interior minister of Germany and the Bavarian justice minister were in the hot seat, trying to cover up two decades of dishonesty.

On August
29, 1992,
Zeltzer received notice from Munich: “We found the documents. You can come to Munich with a local lawyer and collect everything we have.”

The next day Zeltzer flew to the Bavarian capital to scour the municipal archives. In the basement of the archives building, twenty boxes and crates stuffed with dusty files were presented to him. There were
3,808
files holding tens of thousands of documents. There were hundreds of investigative reports, dozens of eyewitness accounts from everyone who had participated in the rescue mission, and nine hundred invaluable photographs, mostly taken after the massacre. It was an incredible collection of material, carefully detailing the events of September
5, 1972,
allowing the families to finally learn the truth about how their loved ones had died.

The material also enabled the families to file a legal claim for compensation. In 1972, when the struggle with the German authorities began, there were thirty-four parents, widows, and children involved. By the time the case was brought to court in the mid
-1990
s, only twenty-five remained alive. The case against the federal government, the Bavarian government, and the municipality of Munich was brought to court in 1994. After years of exhausting legal negotiations in the Bavarian court system, a deal was offered to the families. “If you continue in the courts we will no longer speak with you,” top officials in Berlin said to Ankie Spitzer in 2003. The Germans offered a settlement of 3 million euros, to be divided among the twenty-five complainants, which came to $
115,000
per person.

The families held a tempestuous meeting in Tel Aviv in 2004. Two alternatives were presented. The first: accept the financial offer and forgo the opportunity of forcing the German federal government, the Bavarian state government, and the Munich municipal government to be held accountable for their actions. The second: refuse the offer and continue the indefinite legal battle for at least eight more years.

After long deliberations, the families decided to accept the German offer. Only Ankie Spitzer wanted to keep fighting. “I was disappointed by the decision but I understood the circumstances which led to the vote going the way it did. It wasn’t money that mattered. The lawsuit for monetary compensation, from my point of view, was the only way to force the Germans to deal with and to reveal what had happened, to take responsibility and to announce their guilt and even, maybe, to request to be forgiven. After more than thirty years, we managed to make them bend. Even if they didn’t directly state their guilt, they understood that they were responsible.”

15
                  
TOUGH DECISIONS

TEL AVIV, MOSSAD HEADQUARTERS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1972, 1000H

The “Voice of Israel,” the country’s public radio station, began its top-of-the-hour news broadcast with a series of high-pitched, solemn tones. The headlines followed. On Thursday, September 7, at ten in the morning
,
the lead news item detailed the burial times for ten of the victims of the massacre.

An El Al Boeing 707 carrying ten coffins was due to land at Lod Airport at 1145 hours
.
Israel had withdrawn from the Games and the surviving Israeli athletes and delegation members were on board as well, accompanying their slain colleagues. Funerals would take place immediately following a brief military ceremony at the airport. The eleventh victim, weight lifter David Berger, had been flown from Germany earlier that day. President Richard Nixon had sent an American air force plane to bring the athlete’s body back to his hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

The Israeli government declared September 7 an official day of mourning. The nation was traumatized. Flags were lowered to half-mast; stores, restaurants, and government offices were closed. People clustered in the streets, reading the papers in groups, learning the anatomy of the tragedy.

The Munich attack was unlike anything the young country had weathered. It was a dividing line, separating history into “before Munich” and “after Munich.” Israel had known trying hours before, but Munich cut through all its defensive layers of scar tissue and sinew. Jews had been led yet again to their death on German soil. Images of the athletes, Israel’s finest, bound, unable to resist their impending death, tore deeply into the nation’s psyche. A feeling of helplessness prevailed. Only twenty-seven years had passed since six million Jews had been herded into camps and murdered. Now, the wounds of the Holocaust bled again.

The Mossad department responsible for gathering operational intelligence on terrorist organizations was humming with frenetic activity. An emergency draft had quadrupled their workforce overnight. New recruits, who had passed the rigorous entrance exams two months earlier but had yet to begin the case officers course, were called in to assist the department’s five permanent staffers.

The Mossad staff officers crammed into three small rooms. Their task was to review every personnel file, to reread every piece of data, to find threads and expose connections that would lead them to the identities of the planners and perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. They needed to understand and unmask Black September, and identify its links to Fatah and the PLO.

Over the ensuing weeks and months they would sift through tens of thousands of raw intelligence reports. Mossad personnel stayed up late and worked weekends. Emotions ran high; commitment was total: everyone knew the significance of the quest.

Failure, frustration, and shock were written across Zvi Zamir’s face that morning as he made his way to his tenth-floor office. Three floors below, at the Tzomet (Crossroads) wing of the Mossad, the feeling was equally dour. Tzomet case officers (
katsa
s), operating from Europe, drafted and ran Arab agents that were either part of, or subsequently inserted into, the military, political, and economic spheres of all Arab countries. This human intelligence—HUMINT—was, in the 1970s, Israel’s primary means of discovering the intentions and capabilities of its enemies. But the focus had been on Syria and Egypt—Israel’s neighbors to the north and south—where the threat of war loomed. Terrorist organizations were a bit neglected.

Nonetheless, for the past forty-eight hours Tzomet staff officers had been grappling with a frustrating and demanding question: How did we not sound the bell? How did we not learn of the plan? How did we so utterly fail to pick up a single bit of intelligence about this attack, which must have required a considerable time to plan, and certainly included a few dozen people? One day earlier, just twenty-four hours after the hostage situation came to its tragic end, Zamir had commissioned an internal investigative team to examine the Mossad intelligence failure. It was already clear that no one in the Israeli intelligence community had so much as one quality HUMINT source in Black September or the group surrounding Abu-Iyad or Ali Hassan Salameh at the upper echelons of Fatah.

All Palestinian terrorist organizations raised their level of alertness. They were poised for the scripted retaliatory air strikes that generally followed a major attack. This time, even the Syrian and Lebanese armed forces began preparing for bombardment. Radio communication signals from Palestinian bases called for a mass exodus of operatives.

The wait lasted just over forty-eight hours. At 1550 hours
,
on Friday, September 8, on the eve of the Jewish New Year, two dozen fighter jets from the Ramat David base in northern Israel struck deep in Lebanese and Syrian territory. It was the IDF’s most devastating attack in two years—air force planes bombed eleven Palestinian bases, including one just five miles from Damascus, killing two hundred terrorists and eleven Lebanese civilians. Hundreds more, both terrorist and civilian, were injured. But the dead and injured had no connection with Black September or the massacre in Munich.

At a press conference that day, IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar was asked whether the air strikes were an Israeli response to Munich.

“No,” he said. “Can there be a response to what happened in Munich?”

The strikes, he continued, “were part of the war we are forced to wage against the terrorists so long as they continue to kill Israelis.” When asked whether Black September had been hit, he said: “Black September is part of Fatah. We don’t concern ourselves with whether or not the members of this wing are present in Syria or Lebanon. There are terrorist organizations operating from there and they have declared war on us. We must strike back.”

Coverage of the Israeli strikes in the daily papers was adulatory. “The Air Force gave a
21-
gun salute to the athletes, who were not honored with a military funeral,” one columnist exclaimed.

Days later, IDF forces raided terrorist bases in south Lebanon:
1,350
infantrymen, forty-five tanks, and 133 armored personnel carriers, together with four artillery units and several fighter planes, took part in the mission—“Turmoil 4.” One hundred fifty tons of bombs were dropped over a period of forty-two hours. Scores of villages and towns in south Lebanon, fast becoming home to terrorists expelled from Jordan, were searched. The IDF spokesman’s office reported forty-five terrorists killed, sixteen Palestinian operatives captured, and hundreds of houses damaged or destroyed.

None of those killed or captured had any covert or operational affiliation with Black September. As destructive as these missions were, cabinet ministers and IDF brass knew it was not nearly enough to placate Israeli public opinion: the nation demanded a more significant form of retribution.

The public had no knowledge of a top secret meeting convened by the prime minister days earlier. On Wednesday, September 6, one hour after Zamir’s return from Munich, Prime Minister Golda Meir summoned her cabinet members, among them Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Deputy Prime Minister and Education, Culture and Sports Minister Yigal Allon to Jerusalem. They listened as Zamir, in dry but forceful words, recounted the horror of the murders he had just witnessed. The ministers were livid. A response was necessary. But many were frustrated: Who will we retaliate against? Who will we hit? Who are the commanding officers of the Black September group? Do they even have bases?

By the meeting’s end they had decided on the air strikes and the subsequent ground assault, but all present recognized the need to go beyond the standard retaliatory script. The look of stern resolve on the Old Lady’s face told them that she was prepared to take the difficult steps necessary. She wanted to set a new standard. She realized Israel could no longer afford to respond and retaliate. The Talmudic imperative to “rise and slay the one who comes to kill you” needed to be fulfilled to the letter of the law. A new Israeli response was needed, one that would imprint itself on the minds of conspirators everywhere, and be remembered by the free world.

16
                  
GOLDA GOES FOR REVENGE

TEL AVIV, BRANCH 4, MILITARY INTELLIGENCE HQ TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1972, 2110H

Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Mor walked into one of Branch 4’s two wooden shacks and shot a quick glance at the office’s latest technological wonder: a twenty-one-inch black-and-white television. “What’s on now?” he asked. Without turning from the monitor, Lieutenant Alik Rubin, a fluent Arabic speaker, said, “It’s the Lebanese evening news. They’re showing the Black September funerals, again. They were buried in the afternoon but they’ve been showing it in loops for hours. It’s getting everyone all riled up.”

The German government had agreed to the demands of Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi and released the bodies of the five dead terrorists, who were flown to Tripoli that morning aboard a private jet. Lieutenant Colonel Mor stood in the doorway watching the fuzzy screen for a few more minutes. Although Branch 4’s antenna left a lot to be desired, the events could still be followed. They saw the sea of people bearing the coffins on upturned palms from Martyr’s Square to the Sidi Munaydir cemetery. They listened to the eulogies. The dead terrorists were called “holy martyrs”—
shuhada
; their mission, “one of the loftiest, bravest, in the history of mankind.” The crowd began chanting in Arabic, “We are all Black September.” For days that chant reverberated in rallies throughout the Arab world—in Tripoli, Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad—underscoring the difference between right and wrong, terrorism and bravery, in the eyes of the democratic West and the Islamic East.

The announcer on the Cairo-based PLO radio station, the “Voice of Palestine,” was also turning his attention to the funeral procession of the five fallen
shuhada
. He reported the eight terrorists stated in their joint will, written just hours before their death, that their collective funds, totaling $500 and 37 German marks, were to be used in the service of the Palestinian revolution. The will read: “We are neither killers nor bandits. We are persecuted people who have no land and no homeland. We were willing to give up our lives from the very first moment.” The murderers declared in their will that the nation’s youth should not be afraid to sacrifice their lives for the greater goal. Every drop of spilled Palestinian blood will turn to oil and light the nation aflame with the fire of victory and independence, they said. The will contained no apology, regret, or remorse.

Lieutenant Colonel Mor left the room and walked through the other sections of Branch 4, where around twenty officers and enlisted men were huddled in small quarters despite the late hour, addressing the virtually Sisyphean task of intelligence gathering, searching for any shred of information relevant either to Munich or to future attacks. Everyone was aware that many were already eager to mimic the “success” of the Olympic attack.

Lieutenant Colonel Mor rubbed his hands together, satisfied. The following morning Branch 4 was set to open its new department—Overseas Terrorism, which would concentrate on collecting intelligence about terrorist organizations’ plans against Jews and Israelis beyond the borders of the state. Additional office space for the new department would be assigned in a few weeks. The inauguration of the Overseas Terrorism department was a sign that Military Intelligence was rapidly learning the lessons of Munich.

Another result of the Munich attack was the arrival, days earlier, amidst much fanfare, of the new TV. Mor had personally requested it. He explained, “It was important we see and hear what was happening in the streets of Beirut and the rest of the Arab world. We needed more than a newspaper headline. What we wanted was to be exposed to a variety of voices and views. We knew their intentions but we needed to understand the hues and shades of their thought.”

Yet another tool to come their way was a new computer, the first in the IDF’s Military Intelligence division. Although everyone eagerly anticipated its arrival, no one at Branch 4 had any idea what to do with it. Their initial assignment would be to feed it tens of thousands of intelligence files.

Mor returned to his office and opened the top secret incoming telex file. Nothing noteworthy. Mor was still lacking operable intelligence. He had snippets of isolated information, tiny pieces of a sprawling puzzle. All he could report for certain was that a senior-ranking member of Fatah was responsible for the massacre.

“The massacre at Munich helped us understand that we would have to deal with a new subject that we had never before encountered—terror attacks against Israeli targets abroad,” Lieutenant Colonel Mor later explained to me. “An attack on foreign territory gave the Palestinians a distinct advantage. They received international attention and our job to root out terrorists and prevent future attacks got that much harder. In terms of intelligence gathering, it meant starting from scratch, from the foundations. We didn’t have hard, dependable facts. The massacre came as a complete shock; it knocked us off our feet and forced us to act under immense pressure.”

At 1000 hours on Tuesday, September 12, a special parliamentary session opened in Jerusalem. All 120 members of Knesset, as well as scores of guests, stood for a moment of silence to commemorate the eleven victims of the Munich Olympics. Minutes before entering the Knesset’s main hall, Prime Minister Golda Meir and Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon had ushered the grieving families into her office. She shook hands with the widows, the bereaved parents, and the fatherless children, offering the customary condolences. Golda’s dark eyes gazed straight at them. “I want to share my plans with you. I’ve decided to pursue each and every one of them. Not one of the people involved in any way will be walking around on this earth for much longer,” she said, pounding the table for emphasis. “We will chase them till the last.” No one said a word. There was no applause. The families were far from congratulatory: they did not ask for, or desire, revenge.

The prime minister spoke from the podium at the front of the Knesset assembly hall. “The actions and ways of the terrorists are continually evolving. It is our duty to prepare ourselves for this type of war, more than we have been to this day—methodically, knowledgeably, decisively, and expansively; this is a dangerous and critical task,” she said. The prime minister went on: “From the blood-drenched history of the Jewish nation, we learn that violence which begins with the murder of Jews, ends with the spread of violence and danger to all people, in all nations.” At the end of her speech, the prime minister addressed the developing parameters of Israeli counterterrorism. “We have no choice,” she said, “but to strike at terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace. We shall fulfill that obligation undauntedly.” Meir would repeat these phrases on many occasions—they became part of the Israeli national security ethos. An entire generation of Mossad, Shabak, and Military Intelligence officers have been armed and motivated by her words.

The prime minister faced two demands in the ensuing discussion on the Knesset floor. The right-wing opposition, led by Menachem Begin and his Herut Party, demanded a parliamentary committee of inquiry. “The opposition does not accept your announcement today that the government should place the responsibility for investigating the security breach in Munich solely in your hands,” said Begin, who five years later would be prime minister. “Any democratic parliament the world over would put together an inclusive, official committee of inquiry . . . so the entire nation can know what happened; what was done; what was overlooked; whether there was negligence and who was responsible for it. That is our duty.”

Knesset member Shalom Cohen, of the far left, offered this: “It is our duty to ask these questions, and maybe one question more than the others: how could it have happened? . . . Especially when it was so clear that an Israeli delegation at an Olympic Games could be susceptible to this type of attack; when it is known that there are armed maniacs whose goal it is to harm us? It is our duty to tell the story of [the sprinter] Esther Shachmorov, whose mother didn’t want her to compete in international competitions. She’s famous, her mother said, and there are crazy people in this world. There are terrorists who might try and hurt her. She went to the authorities and to the Israeli Sports Commission, where she was promised that her daughter and the other athletes would be kept safe. And then on the day she escorted her daughter to the airport, she saw there was no security at all. Yet they convinced her that everything was under control . . . . Let’s say that out of deference to German sovereignty we were willing to forgo our desire to place our own armed guards on the ground, does that absolve us of the responsibility to check that the Germans put their own men in our stead? Was that ever checked? Now they come and tell us that there were lapses in security, but they should have seen that on the first or second day of competition; ten days went by and nothing was done. No one came to the German authorities and said: ‘Thank you kindly, but you’re not doing your job, so we will do it for you, otherwise we will withdraw our team.’”

The Knesset then took up the subject of Israel’s response to the attack. There was wall-to-wall consensus. Begin demanded that Israel’s war on terror switch gears. “Retaliation no longer suffices. We demand a prolonged, open-ended assault against the murderers and their bases . . . . We must stifle all of their plans and operations, and snuff out the existence of these murderous organizations . . . . We have the might of hand and mind; we must employ them. We need to run these criminals and murderers off the face of the earth, to render them fearful, no longer able to initiate violence. If we need a special unit to do this, then now is the time to build it.”

As a longtime opposition leader in the Knesset, Menachem Begin had no idea that such a covert unit already existed. It was called Caesarea. Over the next few years the unit, which operated deep undercover, on neutral and enemy ground alike, would double and triple its budget and its manpower. Priorities were shifting all across the intelligence community and nowhere more so than in the Mossad, where Zamir, as its head, began to personally supervise the matter. The “Munich Revolution,” as one renowned Tzomet division head referred to it, had begun.