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CHAPTER 2

SHAPING THE NEW TERROR AGE

BLACK SEPTEMBER

1972 MUNICH OLYMPICS

Saturday, 21 January 2006

THE PROTOTYPE FOR MODERN TERRORISM

Shortly after 4am on 5 September 1972, eight heavily armed militants from Black September, a faction of the PLO, arrived on the outskirts of Munich and scaled a perimeter fence protecting thousands of athletes sleeping in the Olympic Village.

Carrying assault rifles and grenades, the Palestinians ran towards No 31 Connollystrasse, the building housing the Israeli delegation to the Munich Olympic Games. Bursting into the first apartment, they took a group of Israeli officials and trainers hostage: Yossef Gutfreund, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Andrei Spitzer, Jacov Springer and Moshe Weinberg.

In another apartment, they captured the Israeli wrestlers and weightlifters Eliezer Halfin, Yossef Romano, Mark Slavin, David Berger (an Israeli-American law graduate) and Zeev Friedman. When the tough Israelis fought back, the Palestinians opened fire, shooting Romano and Weinberg dead. The other nine were subdued and taken hostage. The Palestinians then demanded the release of 234 prisoners held in Israeli jails.

So began a siege and a tragedy that remains one of the most significant terror attacks of modern times. The assault, and the nature of the Israeli response, thrust the Israeli-Palestinian crisis into the world spotlight, set the tone for decades of conflict in the Middle East, and launched the new era of international terrorism. Olympic events were suspended, and broadcasters filled the time on expensive new satellite connections by switching to live footage from Connollystrasse. A TV audience of 900 million viewers in more than 100 countries watched with lurid fascination.

Initially the Palestinians seemed to relish the attention. They felt the world had ignored them for decades. But after a day of missed deadlines, "Issa", the Black September leader, wearied of negotiations. During the evening he demanded a plane to fly his men and the Israelis to the Middle East. German officials agreed to move the group in helicopters to Fürstenfeldbruck airfield base on the outskirts of Munich, where a Boeing 727 would be waiting to fly them to Cairo. Secretly, however, the Germans began planning a rescue operation at the airfield.

Zvi Zamir, the head of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, arrived in Munich when the plan was finalised and was flown to the airfield just ahead of the hostages and terrorists. "When we got to Fürstenfeldbruck, it was very dark," said Zamir. "I couldn't believe it. We would have had the field flooded with lights. I thought they might have had more snipers or armoured cars hiding in the shadows. But they didn't. The Germans were useless. Useless, all the way."

Just as the Palestinians and Israelis were about to land at Fürstenfeldbruck a group of German policemen on the 727 took a fateful decision and abandoned their positions. Five German snipers were then left to tackle eight well-armed Palestinians. The hostages and terrorists landed at the airfield at 10.40pm. Issa realised it was a trap and the German snipers opened fire, missing their targets. A gunfight began, and bullets sliced through the control tower where Zamir was standing. Then a stalemate developed and Zamir realised the Germans had no idea what to do.

An hour of sporadic gunfire ended when German armoured cars lumbered on to the airfield. The gunner in one car accidentally shot a couple of men on his own side, and the Palestinians apparently thought they were about to be machine-gunned. A terrorist shot four of the hostages in one helicopter as another Palestinian tossed a grenade inside. The explosion ignited the fuel tank, and the captive Israelis burned. Another terrorist then shot the Israelis in the other helicopter. Germans present at the airfield still remember the screams. Eleven Israelis, five Palestinians and one German police officer died during the Munich tragedy. The unprecedented attack, siege and massacre had a huge impact. In many ways it was the 9/11 of the 1970s. Suddenly the world realised terror was not confined to the Middle East.

For Israel, the sight of Jews dying again on German soil, just a few decades after the Holocaust, was simply too much. Israel struck back hard. Warplanes bombed Palestinian "military bases", killing many militants, but also scores of innocent civilians and children. Hundreds of Palestinians joined militant groups in response.

When Germany released the three Black September guerrillas who survived the Munich massacre, after a fabricated plane hijacking, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir then launched a secret operation, known by some as "Wrath of God", to hunt and kill those responsible for Munich. The exploits of the Israeli agents involved in Wrath of God are the stuff of legend and cheap farce. Over the next 20 years Israeli agents killed dozens of Palestinians. They hid landmines under car seats, devised ingenious bombs, and claim to have found and killed two of the three terrorist survivors of Munich.

The first to die was Wael Zwaiter, a Palestinian intellectual who lived in Rome. On the evening of 16 October 1972, Zwaiter was ambling home to his flat in the north of the city and entered his block just after 10.30pm. Two Israeli agents emerged from the shadows and fired 12 bullets into his body at close range. Zwaiter died in the entrance hall.

The assassins then turned their attention to Dr Mahmoud Hamshari, the PLO's representative in France, who lived in Paris with his French wife Marie-Claude and their daughter Amina. Mossad agents have since claimed he was the head of Black September in France, but offer no real evidence. In early December 1972, while an Israeli agent posing as an Italian journalist met Hamshari in a café, at least two Israeli explosives experts entered his apartment and planted a small explosive device under a table by his telephone.

The next day, after Marie-Claude had left to take Amina to school, the "Italian journalist" rang Hamshari at his home.

"Is that you, Mr Hamshari?" asked the Israeli agent in Arabic. "Yes, I am Mahmoud Hamshari," came the response.

The Israelis immediately detonated their bomb. Hamshari was conscious for long enough to tell astonished Parisian detectives what had happened, but he later died in the hospital.

Other Palestinians were eliminated in the following months, before the Israelis launched their most daring operation, sending an elite squad of soldiers into Beirut to kill three senior Palestinians. Ehud Barak, the leader of Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli SAS, and later Israeli Prime Minister, led the mission disguised as a woman, with a black wig and make-up, and hand grenades in his bra. "I wore a pair of trousers because the skirts in fashion then were a little short and narrow," Barak has said. "I also had a very stylish bag, big enough for plenty of explosives."

The killings went on for at least two decades. Mossad agents have tried to claim they targeted Palestinians directly connected with the 1972 massacre. But only a couple of the Palestinians shot or blown to pieces during the operation appear to have been directly connected with the Olympic attack. Instead the dead were mainly Palestinian intellectuals, politicians and poets. And the consequences of these so-called "targeted killings" for Israel have been appalling.

Assassination was not a regular Israeli tactic until Munich. Occasionally Israeli agents sent letter bombs to scientists developing rockets for enemy states, but it was Golda Meir who set a precedent for wholesale use of murder as a counterterrorism policy by authorising an assassination campaign in the aftermath of Munich. Since then assassination has been used to kill scores of terrorists and senior militants, including many of those responsible for major bomb attacks in Israel. In the absence of political solutions, the Israeli government and people have come to rely on targeted killings as their standard response to bombings.

However, many intelligence experts and senior Mossad officials privately admit targeted killings do not work. Assassinations spur revenge attacks on Israelis, and attacks can also go wrong. During Wrath of God, Israeli agents murdered an innocent waiter in Lillehammer, Norway. Several agents were captured and jailed. Then there are the moral and legal issues surrounding targeted killings. During Operation Wrath of God Israeli agents often killed their prey when alone. But since targeted killings became standard policy Israel has repeatedly fired missiles or dropped large bombs on targets, killing bystanders.

Until 11 September 2001, Israel was the only democratic nation obviously using targeted killings to counter terrorism. In July that year, the head of the Israeli army was forced to defend the killings after criticism from the Bush administration. But after 9/11 US policy shifted and Washington prepared a list of terrorists the CIA was authorised to kill. US officials even began studying Wrath of God for tips on how they could strike at al-Qa'ida. In November 2002, a senior al-Qa'ida commander was killed in Yemen when his car was hit by a missile fired by a pilotless US Predator.

Like their Israeli counterparts, American officials have found that once assassination is used as an occasional tactic it has a habit of becoming the norm. Predators have since been used in dozens of attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries. US officials have even responded to the quagmire in Iraq by proposing the creation of special elite squads, managed or assisted by US forces. Yet using blunt military force against terrorists does not work. Even the supposedly clinical killings conducted by Israeli teams in response to the Munich massacre did not stop terrorism. Israelis are still dying in terror attacks.

Simon Reeve is the author of One Day in September, the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.

Simon Reeve

Monday, 5 July 2010

MUNICH MASTERMIND

Before the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Black September Organisation, or BSO (Ayloul al-Aswad in Arabic), was generally unknown except to a handful of Middle East specialists and intelligence services who followed a deadly game of exchanging assassinations between Palestinian guerrilla groups and the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.

The BSO, a splinter group from the Palestine Liberation Organisation, or PLO, was founded, its literature said, "to avenge blood of the martyrs of Black September" (20,000 as claimed by BSO and 1,000 according to Jordanians). The BSO coordinated with international terror groups like the German Bader Meinhof gang and the Japanese Red Army, in targeting Arab regimes who "backed" the Jordanian Army. In November 1971, the BSO assassinated Wasfi al-Tal, who was Jordan's prime minister in 1970, outside the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo, earning the wrath of President Anwar Sadat, who was turning Egypt away from Nasser's revolutionary path towards peace with Israel.

The BSO operations' chief was Mohammed Oudeh, a Palestinian former science teacher known by his nom de guerre Abu Daoud ("Abu" means "father of", and Daoud was his father's middle name given to his only son). Over five months Oudeh planned the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, exploiting his contacts with Syrian intelligence as well as the East German Stasi, smuggling equipment and weapons to Munich, as he later told The Independent).

On 4 September 1972, Oudeh invited a dozen guests to dinner at a Munich restaurant near Munich Banhof, where he went over the final details of the operation. A few hours later, eight of them scaled the wall surrounding the Olympic athletes' village (another three look-outs were never caught). By 4:45am they had taken nine Israeli athletes hostages in their quarters after killing two who, they said, were armed secret agents (they were a weightlifter and a wrestling coach in the Israeli official version).

During 20 hours of negotiations BSO offered to exchange their hostages for 236 Palestinians in Israeli jails. Golda Meir, then Israel's Prime Minister, refused to negotiate.

Oudeh has been consistent, over many personal conversations, in interviews and in his 1998 book From Jerusalem to Munich, published a year later in English as Memoirs of A Palestinian Terrorist, that his clear instructions were "to avoid harming the hostages", whom he wanted to exchange. He later said that he deliberately prolonged negotiation to maximise publicity, "alerting the world to the Palestinian legitimate grievances").

Having aborted a previously rehearsed plan to storm the compound since television cameras were transmitting live to the world pictures of the outside building, which were also seen by the hostage-takers) the West Germans agreed to transport both captors and their hostages in two helicopters, to Furstenfeldbruck military airfield, where an aircraft was waiting to fly them to Cairo (the Egyptians, infuriated by BSO terror activities, had planned to arrest them, according to their official papers).

To everyone's surprise, the German security bungled an armed rescue attempt at the airport, resulting in a chaotic gun battle. When the smoke cleared, five Palestinians, a German police officer and all nine hostages' bodies were found on the runway and on the plane. An Israeli government statement vowed to hunt down and kill any Palestinian who had survived or who had been involved in planning the operation; special squads were recruited from Mossad for the mission, which went on for years.

Mohammed Daoud Oudeh was born in Silwan, East Jerusalem, in 1937. Trained as a teacher in Amman, Beirut and Cairo, he taught mathematics and physics in West Bank Palestinian secondary schools (administered by Jordan's ministry of Education). He later studied law and helped draft the PLO charter and constitution and assisted in other parliamentarian legal issues after joining the Palestinian National Council (or parliament).

He remained in East Jerusalem until captured by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, when he moved to Jordan and joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation. He later admitted to this paper that he had been in contact with them as a "sleeper" of the PLO's largest Arafat-led sub-group, Fatah, of which he was one of the founders. He claimed to have taken part in the Al-Karama battle in 1968 when Israeli forces, using air cover, attacked refugee camps run by the PLO inside Jordan near the village of al-Karama – the first time Palestinian "resistance" fought the Israeli army face to face instead of the hit-and-run or bomb-planting operations they started in January 1965.

He had major disagreements with Arafat over priorities. While Arafat exploited the contradictions between Arab regimes, Oudeh was more of a revolutionary puritan who saw regimes who were not aiding the Palestinians, or who were making bilateral peace deals with Israel, as "enemies who should be fought".

He went underground into Lebanon via Syria in 1970, moving between Libya, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and then to Europe. After the 1972 attack, Oudeh lived in Eastern Europe and moved back to Lebanon in early 1975. When the Lebanon civil war broke out later that year, he participated for a few months, then moved to Jordan. He moved to Ramallah in the West Bank following the 1993 Palestinian Israeli Oslo peace accords.

Upon reading his memoirs, the Israelis banned him from returning to Ramallah following a trip to see his doctor in Amman. He finally settled in Syria – the only country that would take him, and the most militant regime country in the anti-peace Arab bloc.

Oudeh narrowly escaped assassination in what he claimed to be a Mossad operation in a hotel lobby in Warsaw in 1981. Despite being shot several times in his left wrist, chest, stomach and jaw, he chased his assassin (who claimed to be a Palestinian double agent), to the hotel entrance, where he collapsed.

He belonged to a group of hard men who founded the PLO in 1965 and believed that armed struggle must not be given up as an option beside negotiation. In his last interview, with Al-jazeera in 1999, he said he would carry out the Munich attack all over again as he had no regrets, remaining militant to the end. "Today, I cannot fight you anymore,'' he said in a statement to the Israelis shortly before his death of a kidney failure, "but my grandson will and his grandsons, too."

Mohammed Oudeh (Abu Daoud), politician and militia commander; born Jerusalem 1937; married (five daughters, one son); died Damascus 3 July 2010.

Adel Darwish

Wednesday, 2 December 2015

‘NOT JUST A HOSTAGE STORY’

The Israeli Olympic team members held hostage by Black September militants at the 1972 Olympic Games were beaten, tortured – and in one case, castrated – during the siege that eventually ended in the Israelis’ deaths, their widows have said.

In a new documentary on the Munich Massacre, Munich 1972 & Beyond, Ankie Spitzer, widow of Israeli fencing coach Andre Spitzer, explains in an interview that the tragedy was “not just a hostage story”.

Speaking to the New York Daily News, Steven Ungerleider, Olympic historian and one of the documentary’s creators, recalled Ms Spitzer’s interview for the film: “[She said] I think you should know this was not just a hostage story and horrific murder in the Olympic Village – there was torture, our husbands were beaten, and God knows what else.”

At the September 1972 Games, two members of the Israeli Olympic team - wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and champion weight lifter Yossef Romano – were shot and killed in the Olympic village when eight Black September terrorists stormed the team’s apartments armed with assault rifles and grenades. They then took nine Israelis hostage.

Ms Spitzer told the New York Times the hostages were beaten, some to the point that their bones were broken. Mr Romano apparently tried to overpower one of the terrorists, which is when he was shot.

“What they did is that they cut off his genitals through his underwear and abused him,” Ms Romano told the newspaper. “Can you imagine the nine others sitting around tied up? They watched this.”

The Olympic team’s widows discovered what happened to their husbands during the siege over 20 years ago when a series of photographs of the aftermath were released along with German police files during litigation proceedings.

Some details of the torture were reported on 10 years ago when the LA Times obtained copies of the images, but the women have not spoken publicly about their husbands’ torture until now.

It has not been established whether Mr Romano was castrated before or after he was killed, but Ms Romano told the newspaper she believes her husband was already dead when it happened.

The Black September terrorists, representing a branch of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had demanded 234 people be released from Israeli prisons – and two from a German prison – in return for the release of the hostages.

But the ordeal ended with the death of the nine hostages, five terrorists and one German policeman in a bungled police attempt to ambush the Palestinian militants as they tried to escape from Munich’s military airfield.

Three gunmen were arrested in the ambush, but were released three months later when Black September members hijacked a Lufthansa plane in Middle East, promising to blow it up unless their members were released.

The 1972 Olympic Games were suspended for 24 hours and a memorial service held for the members of the Israeli team.

The attack led to a series of Palestinian assassinations by Israel’s Mossad agents. Abu Daoud, also called Mohammed Oudeh, the mastermind of the operation, died in Damascus of kidney failure in 2010.

The documentary focuses on the 43-year fight by the families of the victims for recognition of those killed in the events carried out by the guerrilla group, and its release is expected to coincide with the opening of a memorial for the 11 Israelis in Munich, the New York Daily News reports.

Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith