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Chapter 2

Revolutionary Violence Is a Political Act,

Terrorism Is Not

The year 1972 was an election year in the United States. Richard Nixon, who had come into office in 1969 amid mounting protests against the interminable war in Vietnam, already the longest in U.S. history, was seeking a second term. Nixon's foreign policy agenda was ambitious. Henry Kissinger, who would become both national security advisor and secretary of state in the second Nixon administration, was simultaneously pursuing détente with the Soviet Union, making overtures to the People's Republic of China, and negotiating the extrication from Vietnam. But by the time Nixon and Kissinger negotiated “peace with honor” in the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese delegation in 1972, which led to a complete U.S. withdrawal the following year, the crisis in the Middle East had worsened. Egypt and Syria acted to reverse the humiliation of 1967.

This was also the year of Black September. Black September struck out with a vengeance to compel the world to understand the Palestinian conflict would not be confined to the Middle East. Terror seeped into Europe, and Americans fell victim to terror. The organization that congealed in the bloodshed in Jordan nearly assassinated King Hussein's envoy in London only a week after it murdered his prime minister in Cairo. In February it sabotaged a West German electrical installation and a Dutch natural gas plant. In March it attempted its first hijacking, and at the end of May it attacked a petroleum refinery in Trieste. Black September would attack four more times at different points of the compass before its final operation in March 1973: Europe in September, Asia in December, the Middle East in February, and North Africa in March.

Black September

The principal figures in Black September—Abu Iyad, Mohammed Najjar, Abu Daoud, and Ali Hassan Salameh—were all were powerful actors in Fatah.¹ Abu Iyad, a founder of Fatah, was chief of Fatah's intelligence, Jihaz al-Razd. Mohammed Najjar was Abu Iyad's chief of operations until the Israelis killed him in April 1973. Abu Daoud commanded Fatah guerrilla forces in Jordan before the Jordanians expelled them. Ali Hassan Salameh was Abu Iyad's deputy and would eventually become chief of Arafat's security detail, Force 17, until the Israelis killed him in January 1979. Abu Iyad never acknowledged his connection to Black September, and his public statements about the terror organization are almost undecipherable. “Black September was never a terrorist organization,” he wrote in his memoir, “it acted as an auxiliary to the Resistance, when the resistance was no longer in a position to fully assume its military and political tasks…. Its members always insisted that they had no organic tie with Fatah or the PLO. But I knew a number of them, and I can assure you that most of them belonged to various fedayeen organizations.” The fact is that Abu Iyad not only knew many of the members of Black September, he recruited them—Abu Iyad was the organic link to Fatah. That Black September did not commit acts of terrorism was a question of semantics because, said Iyad, “I do not confuse revolutionary violence, which is a political act, with terrorism, which is not.”²

Abu Daoud's public statements about Black September were made in February 1972 while he was under a sentence of death for conspiracy to seize the U.S. embassy in Amman. “There is no such organization called Black September,” Daoud confessed in a televised spectacle, “Black September is only the intelligence apparatus [of Fatah] Jihaz el-Razd.”³ Daoud named Iyad, Najjar, and Salameh in his public confession, but uttered not a word about Yasser Arafat. Because these men formed the circle around Arafat, Arafat himself was at the epicenter of Black September, even if he was not specifically aware of the details of Black September's operations. This was Arafat's cynicism at its worst. Black September was the concession Arafat made to Fatah's radicals to the dismay of the movement's moderates. One of those moderates, Khalad Hassan, swears he was secretly negotiating a rapprochement between the PLO and Jordan with Wasfi Tel in Egypt when Black September murdered the Jordanian prime minister.⁴

One of the more intriguing figures in Black September was Ali Hassan Salameh. Palestinian militancy was in his lineage. He was only seven when his father, Sheikh Hassan Salameh, died fighting to prevent the Catastrophe in 1948 and became legendary for his sacrifice. The sheikh's son would live up to the family's reputation and eventually share his father's fate. Ali Hassan Salameh took the nom de guerre Abu Hassan, following the practice of affixing Abu, “father,” to his family name, but Israeli intelligence called him the Red Prince. Prince because of his opulent lifestyle, red because of the blood on his hands. Salameh was flamboyant—he had a flare for the good life and a passion for beautiful women. (His second wife, Georgina Rizk, a Lebanese Christian, won the Miss Universe pageant in 1971.) After joining Fatah, he became Abu Iyad's deputy in Fatah intelligence and, eventually, Commander of European Operations in Black September. After Black September ceased terror operations, Arafat made Ali Hassan Salameh chief of Force 17.

The Central Intelligence Agency knew of Ali Hassan Salameh's connection to Fatah intelligence well before Black September's appearance, and the agency worked with him after Black September murdered Americans.⁵ Some time in 1969, Robert Ames, a CIA case officer in Beirut, made contact with Salameh in an effort to establish an informal—and deniable—back channel between U.S. intelligence and the PLO. It was a prudent move, although this sort of back channel violated assurances the Nixon administration later offered the Israelis that the United States would not recognize the PLO. Ames and Salameh met face-to-face in Kuwait in early 1970, months before the Jordanian crisis and more than a year before Fatah set up Black September. Ames, fluent in Arabic, apparently established a rapport with the Palestinian. The men had mutual interests in establishing contact, but their interests were not identical, and they did not have the final authority to reach an accommodation. Salameh, whose contacts must have been sanctioned by Arafat, was interested in a political opening to the United States. Ames was acting in the much more limited interest of the United States in gathering intelligence about threats to Americans and American interests. Arafat could offer intelligence through Salameh in the hope of making a diplomatic breakthrough.

The contact between Ames and Salameh—and between U.S. and Fatah intelligence—would result in a back channel security arrangement, but not until 1974 after Black September actually murdered U.S. diplomats. At the end of 1970, Salameh broke off contact with the CIA, after a senior CIA officer attempted to recruit him in Rome with an offer of a $1 million. The CIA's clumsy effort to buy an asset would have its consequences. Over the next three years, Salameh was directly involved in some, although not all, of Black September's terror operations. It was Salameh who organized the assassination of Wasfi Tel in November 1971 and the attacks in West Germany, Holland, and Italy in early 1972. He then became involved in the planning of a late summer operation in the heart of Europe, an operation that more than any other, including even Haddad's Skyjack Sunday hijackings, defined the threat of terror in the 1970s in the mind of most Americans.

The appearance of Black September was ominous because it meant another killer was roaming in search of victims. But the appearance of Black September did not mean the disappearance of the PFLP. Actually, the PFLP struck first in 1972.

The Lod Massacre

Wadi Haddad never sought the approval of the PLO to conduct terror operations, just as he never heeded the organization's chastisements. George Habash, the nominal secretary general of the PFLP, was in prison in Damascus when Haddad organized the first hijacking, and in Communist China on Skyjack Sunday. Haddad was his own man. George Habash alternated between deep-throated threats against passengers and cautiously phrased denials of responsibility, but by 1971 Haddad commanded the loyalty of his own faction within the PFLP. At the end of February, Haddad's men resumed the offensive.

On 22 February, five PFLP terrorists broke into the cockpit of a Lufthansa Boeing 747 soon after departure from New Delhi en route to Athens.⁶ It was only weeks after the Black September attack on the West German electrical plant. The year 1972 was to be a year of reckoning for West Germany. The terrorists ordered the crew to continue across the Arabian Sea and put down in Aden, in what was then South Yemen, where they could count on the tacit collaboration of the radical government. There the terrorists rigged the plane with explosives and began to issue demands laced with threats against the 175 passengers and 15 crew members. First, the terrorists demanded release of the Black September assassins who murdered Wasfi Tel in Cairo in November 1971. Then they demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968. The PFLP later denied ever having demanded the freedom of Kennedy's assassin, but it issued the denial after it learned that Joseph Kennedy, III, son of the slain presidential candidate, was among the hostages the terrorists had already released.⁷ The prominent American escaped harm with the other passengers, but the terrorists still held the crew. Thousands of miles away, in Beirut, the PFLP discreetly presented its ransom demand to the Lufthansa office. Twenty-four hours later, the terrorists released the last hostages and surrendered to the Yemeni officials.

The resolution of the Lufthansa incident came at a price. The West German transport minister acknowledged Lufthansa's payment of $5 million for the lives of the crew and the return of the plane intact.⁸ In previous hijackings to Damascus, Amman, and Cairo, airline executives and stockholders watched in horror as the Palestinians destroyed the multimillion-dollar jets. The West Germans avoided the monetary losses and averted the loss of life. The West German government managed the September 1970 hostage crisis in Jordan this same way. With the lives of hostages at risk, Bonn offered assurances of the release of imprisoned fedayeen, but only after British and Israeli hostages went free. When the chance of a peaceful resolution presented itself, and the decision was the West Germans' to make, the government acted to save lives. But in a few months time, the West Germans would find themselves entangled in another incident, this time on their own soil, without the option to make concessions.

The terrorists went free soon after the passengers were released. The Yemenis, like the Algerians and the Syrians before them, saw no reason to incarcerate the Palestinian terrorists. The Egyptians, too, would eventually see the prudence of quietly freeing Wasfi Tel's assassins. West German authorities later complained about the terrorists' brief detention, despite the fact that West German intelligence already knew the identities “of at least several of them.”⁹ Several of the terrorists were, in fact, already known to Western intelligence. When the hijacked Lufthansa flight arrived in Aden, Ali Taha was there waiting for it. Taha, who went by the name of Kamal Rafat, personally took charge of the negotiations that produced the release of the hostages and the extortion of Lufthansa. Taha was known to intelligence services because he commanded all the previous PFLP air piracy operations going back to the Algiers incident in 1968.¹⁰ By now, Taha was so well known that he could not board a flight without the risk of compromising an operation. The temptation to commandeer another planeload of hostages must have been tremendous. Eight weeks later Taha succumbed to the temptation, and this desire to see action one more time cost him his life.

In May, Black September, impressed by the spectacular PFLP operations, decided to mount its own hijacking operation. Mohammad Najjar conceived the operation, Salameh, Black September's operational commander in Europe, organized it, and Ali Taha conducted it.¹¹ In May 1972, Najjar was acting as chief of Fatah intelligence, replacing Salah Khalaf, who was quarreling with Arafat. Under the circumstances, Najjar was concerned with his standing among the more militant fedayeen. To compensate for Fatah's lack of experience with air piracy, Najjar enlisted Taha to command a combined Fatah-PFLP operation under the banner of Black September. On 8 May, Taha led three Fatah terrorists in an operation to seize a Belgian Sabena flight en route from Vienna to Tel Aviv. Taha was living dangerously. Even before the flight left Vienna, officials in Brussels warned security in Vienna of a plot to commandeer the flight. Security searched three Arabs for weapons, but inexplicably the search turned up nothing.¹² En route to Tel Aviv, Taha and three confederates, a man and two women, took control of the plane and its 101 passengers and crew in the name of Black September.¹³ Taha had defied the risks of direct participation in the operation and had narrowly escaped capture. Now, instead of directing the flight to a secure location in a friendly country like Algeria, Syria, or South Yemen, he ordered the pilot to continue Ben Gurion International Airport, the original destination. It was an act of utter contempt for the Israeli security forces. But because the risk was great the propaganda value of putting the plane down in Israel was even greater. It was a fatal miscalculation.

Taha's audacity may have astonished the IDF, but it also gave them a tactical advantage. When the plane put down, ground controllers directed the Boeing 707 to a remote area of the airport, and Taha began direct radio communications with senior IDF officers in the control tower. Moshe Dyan, the defense minister and hero of the Six Day War, was present, but Shimon Peres, the transportation minister and future prime minister, handled the negotiations. Taha demanded a straight exchange: 101 passengers and crew for 300 fedayeen held in Israel. The Israelis should deliver the Palestinians directly to the jet; Taha would deliver them to freedom. But Peres refused to make the concession. The most the government could contemplate was the release of perhaps twenty Palestinians as a “gesture of good will,” the innocuous phrase used during the 1968 Algiers incident. In fact, the Israelis were preparing for a demonstration of force rather than a gesture of good will. As night fell on the first day of the hijacking, Israeli commandos disabled the aircraft's landing gear to prevent the hijackers' departure to a more secure location. For the pilot, Captain Reginald Levy, the Israeli action heightened the danger. After Taha threatened murder-suicide unless the Israelis repaired and refueled the jet, Levy appealed over the cockpit radio, “I think they will blow it up, they are serious.”¹⁴ In fact, the Palestinians let 10 P.M. and 5 A.M. deadlines pass without acting on their threat. The delays, and the apparent loss of will, gave the Israelis the time to organize a rescue.

Twenty-three hours after the hostage crisis began, the Israelis communicated their intention to repair the jet in the interest of saving lives. In fact, Israel was mounting its first takedown of a hijacked airliner. The El Al mechanics who assembled beneath the fuselage were really Lieutetnant Colonel Ehud Barak's elite Sayaret Matkal commandos.¹⁵ Before the Palestinians could react, the commandos rushed up ladders onto the wings and forced open the emergency doors. The assault was over in moments. The Israelis killed Taha and another hijacker and captured the two women. The bullets that ripped through the cabin wounded five passengers, killing one. That same evening the Israeli chief of staff, Lt. General David Elazar, issued a challenge: “If all the countries would do as we did, there wouldn't be the disgrace of hijacking in the world.”¹⁶

The Sabena incident marked a turning point in assault on civilian aviation. It did not end “the disgrace of hijacking in the world,” but it raised the risks to the hijackers. The hazards to the hijackers had been negligible thus far. Israeli sky marshals had captured Leila Khaled and killed her accomplice in the El Al incident in September 1970. But the terrorists involved in other operations were not even imprisoned—or not for very long—much less killed. The British, after all, set Khaled free. After the commandos burst into the Sabena jet and killed Taha, terrorists understood that governments had options other than capitulation. Khaled's statement, made after her release in September 1970, that the hijackings proved “we could impose our demands” was no longer valid. Israeli commandos would mount a more spectacular rescue operation at Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976; West German commandos would do so in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1977. In both operations the commandos killed hijackers and rescued hostages. The glory days of the air pirates came to an end in Lod. But the risks increased on all sides. Palestinian hijackers did not execute a single passenger or crew member until December 1973. In future hijackings, terrorists would realize that the credibility of their threats depended on their willingness to kill.

Wadi Haddad grasped the new dynamic. Black September claimed the Sabena operation, but when it failed Haddad lost his most experienced air pirate. Three weeks after Israeli commandos cut down Ali Taha, Haddad turned the Ben Gurion International Airport at Lod into the scene of an atrocity. The Israelis were learning to combat air piracy, and El Al had begun to throw up extraordinary security around airliners after the ground attacks against airliners in Athens, Zurich, and Munich between December 1968 and February 1970. The Israelis were on high alert for Palestinian terrorists, and they had reason to be alert to threats posed by Europeans. The spectacular terror operations of previous years succeeded in attracting mercenaries to the Palestinian cause. Because of its Marxist rhetoric, the PFLP held special appeal. The German Revolutionary Cells provided recruits in search of battlefronts in the world revolution. In April 1971, Israeli security personnel seized four French terrorists with explosives inside the terminal at Lod.¹⁷ But the Japanese were the first to join forces with the Palestinians. The Japanese Red Army, or JRA, was the radicalized Japanese students' answer to the call for revolutionary violence. The JRA, although small, already had carried out its first hijacking in March 1970, months before Skyjack Sunday in September. In February 1971, the JRA's leader, Fusako Shigenobu, traveled to Lebanon to establish relations with Habash and the PFLP. By 1972, JRA militants were training there. Haddad sent them into action at the end of May.

On 31 May, three members of the JRA boarded Air France flight 132 from Paris to Tel Aviv during a stopover in Rome. The three men had no intention of commandeering the plane, because theirs was a suicide mission to massacre passengers in the arrival terminal at Ben Gurion International Airport. Shortly after arriving at 10:30 P.M., the three retrieved their baggage inside the terminal, drew automatic weapons and grenades from their bags, and opened fire indiscriminately. The Japanese killed 24 in the massacre, including 19 Puerto Rican Catholics on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and wounded more than seventy others in the rampage. Two of the attackers were killed, one when he crossed in front of his comrades' line of fire, a second when a grenade exploded in his hands. The third, Kozo Okamoto, was captured and imprisoned in Israel.¹⁸ Witnesses described the rampage: “all of a sudden I saw a tall man in a brown shirt pulling a machine gun and cocking it…. I heard bursts of fire that lasted a few minutes…. I saw people rolling, scattering away…. I saw two people limping through the exit doors.” Emergency personnel arrived to find a scene of carnage, shards of glass, and pools of blood. Shimon Peres, minister of transportation, arrived at Ben Gurion and gave the first briefing to the media: “I am sorry to say that the bloodbath was extremely terrible.” He vowed that Israel would “take every step to fight this new madness.” The PFLP viewed things differently. The PFLP immediately announced “its complete responsibility for the brave operation” and identified the fallen heroes as members of the Squad of the Martyr Patrick Arguello, a reference to the air pirate killed by Israeli security on the El Al flight during the Skyjack Sunday operation. The PFLP believed it had ample justification to describe the operation as brave and the fallen terrorists as martyrs. It timed the operation to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Israel's aggression in the June 1967 Six Day War, and claimed it was a reprisal for the Sayaret Matkal killing of Ali Taha during the takedown of the hijacked Sabena flight earlier in the month. The attack was “the revolutionary answer to the Israeli massacre performed in cold blood…a tribute to the blood of two heroes who fell as a result of a cheap trick.”¹⁹

Israeli authorities interrogated Kozo Okamoto the terrorist who survived the attack. The twenty-four-year-old gave critical details of the planning of the attack and the operational alliance between the JRA and the PFLP. The Lod massacre was to have been a suicide operation, and Okamoto pleaded with the Israelis to permit him to take his own life. But Okamoto would live a long life. He languished in an Israeli prison for twelve years, but he was not forsaken. He went free in 1985 as a result of a prisoner exchange between Israel and the PFLP and disappeared into Lebanon. Japanese authorities never abandoned efforts to bring him to justice and in 2000 persuaded their Lebanese counterparts to arrest him and three other JRA militants. The Lebanese extradited three, but Okamoto escaped prosecution. News of his arrest sparked protests by Lebanese Muslims, who regarded him as a hero for his actions at Lod, and the Lebanese government granted him asylum.²⁰

The Lod massacre revealed the power of ideology to incite to murder. The Japanese militants killed without regard to the innocence of their victims in the name of a struggle that was not their own. Israelis understood that hatred of the Jewish state could justify indiscriminate murder of Jews in the minds of Palestinian terrorists. But the Japanese had no personal connection to Palestine. Their motivation for undertaking a suicide operation for the PFLP was a vague ideological notion that the liberation of Palestine would somehow promote a global revolution. European terrorists who would soon enlist in the PFLP as mercenaries shared this view without ever articulating how indiscriminate slaughter could lead to a more just revolutionary world order.

The Israelis were swift to exact vengeance. On 8 July, the Mossad assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, the PFLP spokesperson in Beirut, with a car bomb. It was Kanafani who, beginning with the July 1968 press conference during the El Al hijacking in Algiers, justified the most unjustifiable acts of violence as the voice of the PFLP. The Mossad must have taken great satisfaction at his death, even though in killing him the Mossad also killed his seventeen-year-old niece. Over the next few weeks, Mossad letter bombs maimed the director of a PLO research center and editor of a PFLP newspaper.²¹ Kanafani's assassination was a prelude to a Mossad assassination campaign sanctioned by the Israeli cabinet at the end of the year in reaction to Black September's next operation—in Munich.

The Games of Peace and Joy

After Lod, Black September became the most clear and present danger. The Sabena hijacking in March went badly, but by the summer of 1972 Black September was preparing for its most infamous operation “to affirm the existence of the Palestinian people,” as Abu Iyad explained it, “by taking advantage of the extraordinary concentration of mass media.”²² In 1972 there was only one event that could demand extraordinary media coverage: the Games of the XX Olympiad in Munich.

The West German government welcomed the summer Olympics as an historic opportunity to erase the ignominious memories of Hitler's 1936 Berlin games. Chancellor Willy Brandt hoped to prove that West Germany was a different state. The venue for the games held great significance for the twenty-one-member Israeli delegation as well. Because Germany under Nazi rule was the epicenter of the Holocaust, by participating in the games the Israeli Olympians would prove the Jewish nation would forever survive. But for the Palestinians the games were something else entirely. If the West believed the creation of a Jewish state somehow assuaged European guilt, the Palestinians demanded the world know that the birth of Israel was their collective Catastrophe by mounting an attack during a sporting festival that in ancient times prompted warring city-states to observe a temporary truce.

In mid-July 1972 Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud—the core leadership of Black September—rendezvoused at a café in Rome. The International Olympics Committee had just announced its rejection of a Palestinian petition to send a Palestinian team to compete in the Games. Abu Iyad was incensed because, he wrote later, it seemed to confirm the international community's belief that Palestinians “didn't deserve to exist.”²³ Two days after their meeting in the Italian capital, Abu Daoud flew to Munich to see the Olympic Village for himself.²⁴ Operation Iqrit and Biri'm—an allusion to Palestinian villages outside Jerusalem cleansed by the Israelis in 1948—was in motion.²⁵

The Games of the XX Olympiad—the Games of Peace and Joy—were set to begin on 26 August. As the world's finest athletes were preparing for competition around the globe, a contingent of Palestinians was training for hand-to-hand combat in a Libyan camp for a mission to infiltrate the Olympic Village and take Israeli Olympians hostage. Yasser Arafat certainly knew of the operation, but he prudently left the operational details to Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, who selected two men—known to the world only as Issa and Tony—to lead the assault. On 7 August, Abu Daoud returned to Munich with Tony to reconnoiter the Olympic Village for a second time. On 24 August Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud rendezvoused again in Frankfurt. Iyad and a female companion flew in from Paris carrying weapons for the assault—Kalashnikovs and grenades—in their luggage. A West German customs official inspected one bag but found only women's lingerie and waved the couple through. Over the next few days, Abu Daoud transported the weapons from Frankfurt to Munich by train and concealed them in lockers in the terminal building.

The failure of West German—and U. S. and European—intelligence agencies was catastrophic. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, senior members of Fatah and Black September, managed to move around European capitals without detection. Now they were in West Germany, a country that had already had brushes with Palestinian terror. PFLP terrorists attacked Israelis on West German soil in Munich in February 1970, hurling grenades at the El Al ticket counter. Black September sabotaged a West German electrical plant in February 1971, and later that month the PFLP hijacked a Lufthansa flight to Yemen. After the Lufthansa incident, West German authorities complained about the Yemeni leniency because some of the terrorists were known to the West Germans. Yet inexplicably, West German authorities, who should also have known about Abu Iyad, failed to detect him at the airport with weapons of war. And the West Germans had their own indigenous terrorism. The German Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells, which were already planting bombs in West German cities by the time RAF leader Andreas Baader made contact with the PFLP in February 1972, only seven months before the West Germans would welcome the world to a restored West Germany. In fact, the West Germans had Baader in custody when the games began and after the Palestinians seized the Israeli athletes they included the release of Baader among their demands. Despite all this, the authorities were unaware of the presence of armed guerrillas in Munich until Black September violently seized the Israeli Olympians and captured the world's attention. West German and Olympic officials may have believed that the sanctity of the Olympic spirit would ward off evil, but that very attitude gave the Palestinians an advantage.

Abu Daoud visited the Olympic Village with a young woman on the day of the opening ceremonies. Posing as Brazilians, the Palestinians talked their way past security and entered the village. As Abu Daoud tells the story, a female member of the Israeli delegation unwittingly invited them into the foyer of the Israeli athletes' apartment complex at 31 Connollystrasse. “She had no way of knowing she had considerably facilitated our task,” Abu Daoud wrote almost three decades later.²⁶ The operational commander of Operation Iqrit and Biri'm now had detailed knowledge of the layout of the apartments he would order his men to storm.

Eleven days later, Black September transformed the Games of Peace and Joy into a spectacle of terror and death. Just after 4 A.M. on 5 September, the eve of the second anniversary of Skyjack Sunday, eight Palestinians converged outside the Olympic Village near the Israelis' apartments on 31 Connollystrasse. Their running suits and athletic bags completed the disguise of athletes returning from local pubs after curfew. Other athletes saw them but suspected nothing. No security guards patrolled the parameter. Only a low wall stood between the Palestinian terrorists and the Jewish athletes asleep in separate apartments. Thirty minutes later, after a swift assault on two apartments, two Israelis were dead and nine others taken hostage. It was their last day of life.

The Palestinians encountered resistance trying to enter one apartment, but forced their way in past an Israeli who threw himself against the door. They shot and wounded another Israeli, Moshe Weinberg, who struggled for a terrorist's weapon. The bullet tore through his jaw, causing a horrible wound, but did not knock him unconscious. One Israeli escaped through a window when he was awakened by the sounds of struggle outside his bedroom. Within minutes the Palestinians held six Israelis and moved on to a second apartment, forcing Weinberg, who was bleeding profusely, to come with them. The Palestinians seized the six Israelis sleeping in the second apartment without resistance. But as they forced the athletes at gunpoint back to the first apartment, one Israeli broke free and ran down a flight of stairs, into a parking garage beneath the apartments and to safety. In the same instant, Moshe Weinberg lunged at the Palestinians again. The act probably saved his compatriot's life, but it cost him his own, as a terrorist shot him to death in the act. When the Palestinians gathered the second group of hostages together with the first in an upper bedroom, another Israeli, Yossef Romano, made a desperate grab for one of the terrorist's weapons. The Palestinian killed him instantly with a burst from his Kalashnikov. The assault ended with Romano's death. There, in a bedroom before dawn, nine Israelis were bound and forced to sit in a circle around Romano's corpse on the floor in a pool of blood as a warning to the Israelis about the punishment for resistance.

By 5 A.M. the Israelis who escaped alerted officials in the Olympic Village to the assault. Word spread throughout West German officialdom and the media. As police arrived at the scene, Issa, the commander of the operation, appeared outside the apartment to communicate demands for the release of hundreds of fedayeen from Israeli prisons and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff, the leaders of the Red Army Faction, whom West German authorities had finally arrested in June. Issa set a 9 A.M. deadline for compliance with the demands; after that Palestinians would begin executing the Israelis one by one. To prove their seriousness, the Palestinians threw Weinberg's body into the street in front of the apartment where they held the other Olympians.

The West German government conveyed Black September's demands to Golda Meir, the indomitable Israeli prime minister, who immediately rejected them in principle. Meir refused even to contemplate negotiations. Instead, Meir immediately dispatched the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, to Munich as she pleaded with the West German authorities to permit an elite Sayaret Matkal counterterrorist unit to assist in a rescue. The Israeli special forces had proven their abilities just last May, when they took down the Sabena hijackers. Meir put them on alert to leave for West Germany at a moment's notice. The call to action never came.

West Germany's highest officials rushed to Munich before day's end. Chancellor Willy Brandt arrived in the afternoon. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister and future foreign minister, arrived at the same time and met face-to-face with Issa. Genscher even offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the release of the Israelis. Then the West Germans offered an undisclosed sum of money and safe passage for the Palestinians in exchange for the lives of the Jewish athletes and the swift termination of an embarrassing incident. A cash offer worked in February when the PFLP seized a Lufthansa flight and diverted it to Aden. It was the PFLP that seized the Lufthansa flight, but Black September was not content with a massive infusion of cash into its war chest. Israel's adamant refusal to capitulate to the terrorists' demands—or to make a good will gesture like those offered during the El Al crisis in Algeria in 1968—left the West Germans with few options. The most promising possibility was to persuade the Egyptian government to mediate. In fact, the terrorists' contingency plan involved departure to an Arab state with the hostages. But Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would not assume responsibility for their lives. With Israel refusing to negotiate and Egypt refusing to mediate, the West Germans could only attempt to delay and deceive the eight terrorists barricaded inside 31 Connollystrasse with the nine Olympians.

The West Germans managed to push back the 9 A.M. deadline for the beginning of the executions until noon, then one o'clock, then three, then five, then seven. By early afternoon they were reluctantly planning a rescue operation. The first attempt at an armed rescue came after the deadline was pushed back to seven. By then officials, including Genscher, had entered the Israeli apartment and seen the terror in the eyes of the Jewish athletes for themselves. “I will never forget those faces,” Genscher would say later.²⁷ Rescue must have seemed the last best option. But there was no elite counterterrorism unit up to the task. The best the Munich police could muster were a dozen or so police for an assault, police whose courage surpassed their training. Fortunately for them, their superiors never gave the order to attack. Issa, who saw live television images of the police assembling on the roof above them, forced the West Germans to pull back with the threat of the immediate execution of hostages. The journalistic impulse to broadcast breaking news compromised the mission and, although the indiscretion could have cost lives, it probably saved them for the time being. Even some of the police selected to break into the apartments through the air vents admitted the operation was suicide. But the disaster that was adverted in the Olympic Village was awaiting the Israeli athletes, and the terrorists who abducted them, on the outskirts of Munich.

The West Germans seized on another stratagem: they would lure the Palestinians to Fürstenfeldbruck, an airport outside Munich, with the false promise that a Lufthansa 737 would fly them and the hostages to Cairo. Genscher informed Issa that a peaceful resolution of the crisis was near. Issa had only to allow the West Germans time to arrange the complicated logistics: helicopters to transport the Palestinians and the Israeli Olympians to Fürstenfeldbruck, a jet to fly them to Egypt, pilots who would risk becoming hostages or casualties. It would take another three hours for the West Germans to put everything in place. The reality was that the West Germans wanted to lure the Palestinians into a field of fire. Snipers took positions in the parking garage beneath the apartment complex. It was nearly two hundred yards from the Israeli apartment to the field where the helicopters were waiting. But Issa, who took the precaution of walking the distance with officials to observe the route for himself, demanded a bus. The West Germans were forced to move the ambush to Fürstenfeldbruck. It was after 10:00 P.M. before Issa, the seven other fedayeen, and the nine Israelis made their way from 31 Connollystrasse to the bus and through the parking garage to the helicopters for the thirty-minute flight to Fürstenfeldbruck. Twenty minutes later, the two helicopters were airborne. The Israelis were bound inside, five in one helicopter, four in the other.

The fatal tactical errors at Fürstenfeldbruck were those of a police force that had not contemplated a terror attack in the Bavarian capital. The snipers deployed at the darkened airport were poorly armed and inadequately trained for a firefight with hardened commandos. They had only hours to organize an ambush. Those on the ground were not even in direct radio contact with each other. The police might have stood some chance of success against fatigued Palestinians if the crisis had dragged on for days, but the Palestinians, aware of the fate of the Black September hijackers of the Sabena flight in May, did not commit the failure of permitting the West Germans or the Israelis to wear them down. The West German refusal to permit Israel's Sayaret Matkal to take charge of the rescue, or even to give tactical advice, was about to have terrible consequences. And in an incredible intelligence failure, the West Germans deployed only five snipers. Authorities in the Olympic Village never conveyed an accurate count of the Palestinians to the police who were assembling to ambush them.

The helicopters arrived just after 10:30 P.M. Most of the terrorists stepped off, exposing themselves to snipers concealed on the roof of the small control tower building directly in front of them. Issa and another terrorist walked across the tarmac to inspect the jet awaiting them with engines revving. But when they boarded it they found no crew and sensed a trap. West German police, who were to have overpowered the men, abandoned their positions only minutes before the helicopters put down. The rescue failed then and there. As the Palestinians ran back to the helicopters shouting over the roar of the engines, the West Germans opened fire. But the snipers' aim was not true. One terrorist was killed in the first volley of shots, another wounded. But the others took cover beneath the helicopters and returned fire. The nine Israelis bound together inside the helicopters were defenseless as bullets ricocheted off the tarmac. The firefight at Fürstenfeldbruck lasted more than an hour. It ended in a massacre. As the West Germans brought up armored vehicles in support of the snipers, the Palestinians acted on their orders to defend themselves. One Palestinian fired at point-blank range into one helicopter, killing four of the Jewish athletes, another threw a grenade into the second helicopter killing the other five. When it was over, nine Israelis, five Palestinians, and a West German policeman were dead.

The carnage on the tarmac at Fürstenfeldbruck was not the end of the incident for either the Palestinians or the Israelis. Black September felt duty-bound to liberate the three imprisoned survivors of Operation Iqrit and Biri'm. It took them less than two months to force the West Germans to free them. On 29 October, Black September terrorists seized control of a Lufthansa flight out of Beirut for Munich and diverted it to Damascus. On the ground in the Syrian capital the hijackers threatened to blow up the plane and the passengers unless the German chancellor released fedayeen incarcerated in West Germany. Willy Brandt complied, and the survivors of the firefight in Munich went free.²⁸ It was the end of a bad run for West German counterterrorism. The authorities failed to intercept the terrorists who attacked the Olympics, killed the Israeli hostages trying to save them, and now submitted to demands for the release of terrorists from their jurisdiction.

Committee X

Judaism teaches that anyone who saves a life saves the world; it also teaches an eye for an eye. Golda Meir resolved to be true to the ancient tradition. In the aftermath of the atrocity in West Germany, Golda Meir convened a meeting of her senior national security and counterterrorism advisors. At their urging, Meir resolved to hunt down the leadership of Black September. This was the origin of the Mossad Operation Wrath of God. Even for a state at war with implacable adversaries, the decision to sanction assassination crossed an invisible line into morally ambiguous territory. Plausible deniability became critical for political as well as the obvious operational reasons. Operation Wrath of God became a closely guarded secret of an ad hoc Committee X composed of the highest authorities of the Jewish state.²⁹ Committee X sent covert teams of assassins across the Middle East and Europe to hunt down Black September terrorists. Without making the error of moral equivalence, the assassination teams were not unlike Black September. If the Palestinians adopted the name Black September to obscure the connections between its actions and the PLO leadership, the assassination teams attempted to distance themselves from the Mossad. The assassination teams led by the shadowy “Mike”—Mike Harari, who decades later became involved with Panamanian dictator Manual Noriega—and “Avner” went so far as to resign their commissions in the Mossad to create the conditions for plausible deniability in the argot of the intelligence community.

In fact, Committee X only decided to intensify and broaden a campaign of selective assassinations the Israeli government had begun years earlier. In July, before Munich, the Mossad assassinated Ghassan Kanafani and maimed lesser-known PLO figures with letter bombs; two years before that, in July 1970, the Mossad nearly assassinated Wadi Haddad in his Beirut apartment. Assassination was nothing new. The national clamor to avenge the Israeli Olympians only provided Israel more justification for reprisal killings or preemptive strikes to smite its terrorist enemies. Not all those marked for death belonged to Black September; PFLP cadres were hunted down and killed as well. And, the assassinations Committee X sanctioned served a broader strategic purpose. Not all those killed were terrorists; some were PLO moderates, who were killed at a moment when Israel had reasons to fear Arafat's tilt toward moderation.

The three survivors of Black September's Munich operation figured prominently on the Mossad hit list, but the chieftains of Black September—Abu Iyad, Mohammed Najjar, Abu Daoud, and Ali Hassan Salameh—were the' principal targets. The Israelis never managed to kill Abu Iyad; he would be killed by a dissident Palestinian he had recruited into Fatah; Sayaret Matkal, Israeli special forces, killed Najjar in Beirut in 1973; the Mossad seriously wounded Abu Daoud in 1981, but he survived and, a decade after the assassination attempt, voted as a member of the Palestinian National Council to rescind the clause in the PLO charter calling for the destruction of Israel.³⁰ Ali Hassan Salameh, whom the Israelis called the Red Prince, frustrated the Israeli assassination squads until 1979; in fact, Israeli intelligence committed one of its most damaging blunders in 1974 when it killed a man it mistook for the Red Prince in Norway. Committee X also marked Wadi Haddad, the “Master” of PFLP operations, for death. The Israelis, who attempted to assassinate him as early as 1970, never managed to kill him; he died of cancer in 1978. Mohammed Boudia was the chief of PFLP operations in Europe and superior to the infamous Carlos the Jackal; the Israelis planted the bomb that killed him in his car in Paris in June 1973. Basil al-Kubaisi managed logistics for the PFLP; the Israelis killed him in Paris in April 1973.

Committee X's assassination squads struck within weeks of Munich, killing men who did not suspect the Mossad was hunting them. On 16 October 1972, the Israelis tracked Wael Zwaiter to Rome and shot him to death in the lobby of his apartment building. On 8 December, a Mossad assassination squad killed Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris. This time the assassination was more imaginative. Hamshari's killers placed a bomb under his telephone table and detonated it when he identified himself to a caller posing as a journalist interested in interviewing him. In January 1973, the Mossad killed Hussein Abad al-Chir in Cyprus by detonating a bomb placed under his bed. None of these men were directly involved in the Munich atrocity; indeed, there are doubts about their involvement in Black September. The Israelis had reason to believe that Zwaiter, PLO representative in Rome, had been involved in the El Al hijacking in July 1968. Hamshari was an intellectual, not a terrorist operative, but the Mossad believed he had had a hand in the Munich operation; the Israelis were certain al-Chir was the PLO contact with the Soviet KGB.³¹ These were only the first in a series of assassinations—and counter-assassinations—in a dirty war that would continue through 1973 and into 1974.

At the end of the year, Black September mounted its second major operation, on the other side of the world from the first. On 28 December, four Palestinian terrorists raided the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok.³² They seized six Israeli diplomats, among them the ambassador to neighboring Cambodia, who happened to be visiting. They issued the usual demands: the release of 36 imprisoned comrades. The terrorists' sense of solidarity was inclusive: the name of Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese Red Army survivor of the Lod massacre, figured on the list. The Munich incident was still vivid in the memories of the Israeli and Thai governments. Golda Meir, whose intelligence agency was just beginning to hunt down those responsible for Munich, reasserted the Israeli government's policy of non-negotiation. The government of Thailand, embarrassed by the breach of security, made a daunting show of force by encircling the embassy with security forces. As important as the Israeli and Thai reaction was that of Egypt. President Sadat had refused to become embroiled in the Munich incident. His refusal to grant the Black September commandos safe passage to Cairo not only contributed to the tragedy at Fürstenfeldbruck, but damaged his diplomacy. By the end of 1972, Sadat was interested in gaining support for a negotiated return of the Sinai, lost to the Israelis in the Six Day War.

The intervention of the Egyptian ambassador proved critical. Whatever encouragement the terrorists may have taken from the release of the three survivors of the Munich, the deaths of the other five must have weighed heavily on their minds. With no other viable options, the four Palestinians accepted the Egyptian offer of safe passage and surrendered without harming their captives. Everyone took away different lessons from the Bangkok incident. For governments confronted with the threat to their diplomats—this included the Nixon administration—Bangkok taught the efficacy of absolute refusal to strike deals with terrorists. For the terrorists, Bangkok taught the futility of threats and the imperative to kill.

Abu Iyad and Ali Hassan Salameh had shifted tactics from hijacking airliners to seizing embassies. The change was first evident in Munich. Instead of seizing random passengers, Black September would pursue high officials and dignitaries. There was another critical change in strategy. Black September's major operations after Bangkok—an embassy takeover in Amman in February that failed and one in Khartoum in March that succeeded—revealed its perception of its real enemy, the United States.