Circle Around the Sun

by M. D. Johnson

  “Emily,” it was Wallace-Terry. “We’ve just learned that Weinberger’s body has been thrown out into the street and there has been a list of demands from Black September. It’s just as we thought. They want the release of over 200 Arabs and, are you listening Emily? German prisoners held in Israel and West Germany. They’ve even provided for our bloody convenience a list of preferred names. No surprises here, Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, and Ulrike Meinhof. They want three planes and once they have confirmation of the release of the prisoners, they’ll select which plane they will use to get them out. Are you ready to help us with what we need, Emily?”

  “Human intelligence? Yes, sir, of course. I’ll stay in touch,” she replied without further comment.

  Emily readied herself for an excursion into her Heidelberg office after making sure that the children were safe with Frau Blatz, her new neighbor, a retired schoolteacher. “Well now,” she said aloud, “Let’s see how fast the wheels of German bureaucracy can turn.”

  Coordination of the West German rescue effort was given somewhat unceremoniously to Herr Kommissar Manfred Schreiber, who also held the responsibility as Chief of Olympic Security Forces. Almost immediately, and much to her disdain, contact was established with Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir. The chain of command was West German Chancellor Willie Brandt and the Bavarian Minister of the Interior, Bruno Merk to whom Kommissar Schreiber reported. The phone call to the Germans from a rasping Israeli voice held no surprises.

  “Herr Kommissar, let me make this perfectly clear to you, as we speak the Prime Minister is advising Bundeskansellor Brandt in no uncertain terms that The State of Israel does not, unlike the British, capitulate to terrorists!”

  “Madam Shavit, we have been successful in getting three deadlines from them so far. They now want a jet to get them to Cairo and we understand they want you to have the Arab prisoners held in Israel transported there.”

  “It will never happen. You will not have cooperation from Egypt,” she responded adamantly, slamming down the phone.

  Within five minutes another conversation took place, this one ending on a more positive note, between the caller Hanna Shavit, Special Counsel to the Director of Mossad in Tel Aviv and the recipient of her news, Yacouta D’Aboville, who was relaxing at her home in Cairo. Aunt Jack wasted no time in contacting her close friend Jihan Sadat, the wealthy and well-connected Anglo-Egyptian wife of Egypt’s beloved President Anwar Al Sadat. Fifteen minutes later, the response from Cairo to the terrorist’s demand of sanctuary in Egypt was a very clear no. Half an hour later Mossad Chief Executive Officer Zwi Zamir received his orders from his Prime Minister.

  “Zwi, I do not want to take a city for every son that is lost, but if my hand is forced, I will. However, what I will not under any circumstances do is to negotiate with these animals. Leave for Germany immediately! You will advise the German authorities that we do instead seek our ‘Racher’, and we will exact that very same revenge on our terms only! Any rescue mission will be conducted by our ‘Sayaret’. Is that understood? Not the Germans!”

  Knowing that the “Sayaret” reputation as the best trained reconnaissance force in the world must be upheld and that no other commandos or snipers could do the job as well, Zamir could do nothing but agree with the austere, iron-willed woman. He remembered that this woman had once been described by her predecessor, David ben Gurion as being the “only man in the Israeli cabinet”. If then, the “Lady Upstairs” wanted the elitists to undertake the mission; he would have to convince the Germans to do that. Nothing less would suffice.

  Despite the wishes of Prime Minister Meir and the concurrence of her request by Chancellor Brandt, the plan met opposition on a local level with Kommissar Shreiber who refused, as was his right under German law, under any circumstances to share the task with rank outsiders. Shreiber opted instead to initiate a German rescue mission. The terrorists at their own agreement were shuttled by helicopter to the NATO base at Furstenfeldbruck Airport where they would, they thought, be given an airplane transporting them to Cairo. Once there, Kommissar Shreiber decided to use his own police sharpshooters to combat the terrorists. Sadly, although competent within their own environment, the police department lacked the in-depth training and experience of the Israeli strike force and their attempts, as history would confirm, proved futile.

  The Deutche Polizei snipers arrived at the Furstenfeldbruck Airport situated just outside of Munich to find they were seriously undermanned. There were three more terrorists than anticipated, making their counter-terrorism strike redundant. The police had placed a “Trojan horse” Boeing 727 at the airfield, complete with police officers disguised as flight attendants and crew. Unfortunately the bureaucrats made a major mistake in that the “mock up” 727 had no radio communication, either with their command post or any other police department within the county.

  The “Fedayeen”, by now prepared to die if necessary, left the hostages in what they had termed a “safety zone” and at this point Schreiber gave the order for his snipers to fire. Lacking the expertise of a specially trained commando team and being under extreme pressure, their initial rounds went completely off target and resulted in a full scale confrontation lasting over an hour between terrorists and police. The police made another fatal error by attempting to force the terrorists away from the helicopters which resulted in one of the “fedayeen” pitching a grenade into the helicopter holding five of the hostages. The helicopter exploded into a blazing inferno within seconds. There were no survivors. While attention was focused on the blazing remains of the helicopter, another terrorist entered the second craft and shot each of the four surviving hostages, killing them instantly. The German police then moved in and captured three terrorists. The stand off was over, and to the surprise of many and outrage of some, the Olympic Games continued.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  Far away in Tel Aviv, an elderly woman in a thick wool cardigan and tweed skirt put down her telephone and stared out of her office window in disbelief. Removing her thick glasses, she retrieved the handkerchief she always kept tucked in her sleeve, cleaned the lenses and then stopped suddenly to wipe the tears that were falling down her lined cheeks. “Did I do wrong, Lord God of Israel?” she asked to the world outside the window. “Should I have negotiated?” She paused as if waiting for divine response. “No. I was right. There can be no compromise,” she said to the dark clouds outside.

  “Miriam. Come in please,” she said into her intercom. “The hostages are dead. I must make an official announcement.”

  “Yes of course, Prime Minister,” her secretary replied, picking up her shorthand notebook and entering the PM’s inner sanctum.

  “Take this down,” Israel’s Prime Minister began, “Israel will persevere in her struggle against the terrorist organizations and will not absolve their accomplices from responsibility for terrorist actions,” she said defiantly, and when she concluded, she was firm in her conviction that a new counter-terrorism policy must be implemented.

  Within twenty-four hours, Prime Minister Golda Meir appointed her trusted ally General Aharon Yariv to the post of Advisor on Counter-terrorism and met with Mossad Chief Executive Officer Zwi Zamir who had just returned from Germany. Together and within a few hours, they persuaded the usually conservative Israeli cabinet in emergency session to form an ultra-secret counterterrorist committee. The first direct order from their Prime Minister was to formulate a lethal response to the Munich tragedy. She appointed the eye-patched Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to chair the panel, which would be known as “Committee-X”. The committee’s objective was to authorize the assassination of any Black September terrorists involved in the Munich terrorist attack. Prime Minister Meir advised her committee that this meant without question, that any individual directly or indirectly involved in the planning or the execution of the assault must die! She said, “The law of retribution. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, an arm for an arm and a life for a life! We will create terror wi
thin their organization. We will not seek to capture, Gentlemen, nor will we seek to prosecute. This is your only objective. Now proceed!” and she left them to implement her edict without further hesitation.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Mossad was given the responsibility of implementing the Meir directive and Zwi Zamir selected his foremost agent, Mike Harari to spearhead the development of the various undercover teams. Mossad’s operation officer, Abraham Gehmer, working under official cover at the Israeli Embassy in Paris, was selected to work together with Harari and it was determined that Paris would be the ideal location as headquarters for regional operations.

  As was frequently the case in any Mossad designed special operation, several independent teams, each with a different but clearly defined mode of operation were formed with the same goal and objective. The rigidity of each team’s designated task strategy was such that they were unaware of the existence of the other assassins with the same mission. This multi-pronged approach served well in recruitment of short term operatives, overall mission control, and when necessary emergency intervention. One group would work within the construct of Mossad bureaucracy maintaining official sanction and the others, covertly financed, operated outside of it. Each team symbiotic yet plausibly deniable should problems arise.

  British, American, German and Israeli intelligence were fully aware that the organization Black September, who had claimed responsibility for the Munich massacre had a vast membership worldwide in 1972. Still reeling from the capitulation of the British Government in the “Khaled Affair”, other intelligence services had closely observed “trades” with other terrorist factions as a precautionary measure. Black September had claimed nine attacks on Israel prior to Munich, but in August of the previous year Tony Shallal heard from a news hound at “The London Times” that Andreas Baader had met secretly with Palestinian officials that February, this had been confirmed by Emily through her contacts in Heidelberg and in the training camp. The Times had, in the interest of national security held back on their story until September, allowing the other nations working closely together to validate their own sources of information. It had come to light that there were an active Black September Organization offshoots in the cities of Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Bonn and West Berlin, all reporting to Lebanon and all fundraising in Europe!

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  Emily’s private theory was that Sammi Farouq had been laundering funds for years for use by Palestinian radicals with communist leanings with the support of the Communist Party in the pro-socialist North of England. While the political thrust of the British Labour Party was long since a thing of the past, the Tories were indeed losing their grip and it would take a “get tough approach” to keep the communist funded “New Left” at bay. The Conservative Party needed new leadership and although Education Minister Margaret Thatcher was unpopular with both the press and the working class, she was rapidly rising in the party ranks. Emily had seen Mrs. Thatcher at Conservative Party functions at her parent’s home and she had been impressed at the Minister’s strength of character as well as her views on curbing the threat of international terrorism. Until such a time when a stronger Prime Minister was elected and the government was willing to fund a better equipped intelligence service than the current MI6, money would flow freely from England to radical groups on both sides of that tiny piece of land in the Mediterranean that had no oil, which had been designated the promised land to rival factions. Somehow, Emily Desai needed to prove that there was working capital moving from Liverpool to Cairo and Lebanon, money which ultimately funded terrorist attacks worldwide. It was simply a matter of connecting the dots.

  In frantic telephone conversations over the next twenty-four hours, Emily was advised that the three terrorists arrested in Munich had, under interrogation admitted to being students who until the incident itself resided in Jordan. They provided substantial information on fifteen Arab guerillas involved in the planning of worldwide terrorist strikes. Emily’s impression was that these young men were the end result of decades of discontent and were just three well trained assassins out of possibly thousands of starving, homeless young recruits picked up off the street and fed and housed by terrorist recruiters. Often young people like herself were recruited on university campuses where their intellect was stimulated by the very potential of a strategic involvement in terrorism. Clearly these recruits were the aftermath of Jordan’s expulsion of “Fatah” and their settlement throughout Lebanon. “Fatah”, the abbreviation of “Harakat al-Tahrir al Filistine” or Palestine Liberation Movement, as an organization was growing rapidly and had now become the military strength and combat arm of the PLO. Now that they were strategically limited in their border fighting in Israel, they had no alternative than to make terrorist strikes on Israeli citizens or supporters throughout the world to gain the public attention they felt they needed to survive.

  Emily validated that Andreas Baader met with the PLO at their headquarters and training camp in Shatila, near Beirut. She knew from her limited conversations with Ulrike Meinhof that despite Andreas’ unsuitability for actual combat training he was the front man the Baader-Meinhof Gang required. His James Dean and Brando influenced looks and “bad boy” manner had even impressed the PLO leaders. They believed that this handsome, ill-mannered, young upstart could certainly bring the attention of western youth to their cause. Attracting young people, the biggest spenders of all, would furnish their coffers with more usable funds. The PLO and Baader had agreed, as Emily had learned from camp gossip the previous year, to exchange members. The PLO/Baader meeting was known to Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), assistant to Yasser Arafat and leader of Black September. Through Emily’s contacts with lower level gang members in Heidelberg’s radical student community she also learned that Salah Khalaf’s second in command, Mohammed Oudeh (Abu Daoud) was reputed to be the behind the scenes mastermind of the Munich attack. It was abundantly clear that this “loaning out members” scenario would prove difficult for any intelligence service to monitor. No one would suspect European student radicals representing Black September and trained for a search and destroy mission in Europe. Who would have thought that a member of the Munich assassin squad would pose as a member of the cleaning crew to get a pass key to gain entrance to the athletes’ apartment? In an environment where third country nationals, known as “Gast Abeiters” or guest workers spent every day and had formed their own underclass, members of an organization like Black September could go undetected for years. Germany was used to its own terrorists, not members of the PLO on a raid, and the rest of Europe with the exception of Britain had been taken by complete surprise at the Munich incident.

  While MI5 and MI6 were already familiar with an alliance between the PLO and Irish terrorist groups, they still had not taken counter measures needed to make the borders less porous. Seaports like Liverpool went unprotected. One could smuggle anything in or out of the dock. The Port of Liverpool offered daily crossings of the Irish Sea by ferry to both Dublin and Belfast and security in 1972 on such crossings was lax if not totally non-existent. It was then, to Emily’s way of thinking, highly convenient to mix and match terrorist groups. After all, that was the point, the most effect for the least effort! Why recruit and train when one can borrow and return?

  The more Emily researched terrorists, their membership and strategy, the more she became convinced that this wasn’t about ideology at all. Nor was it about the plight of the Palestinian people, the Northern Irish or the oppressed worldwide. It was about money and power. The haves and the have-nots! It was that simple and that complex! She slowly began to realize that the Palestinian leaders weren’t fighting for the majority of the people scratching out a living. Those poor sods would remain impoverished and needy regardless of who was in power. Their leaders just didn’t want the Israelis to be in control. Conversely, The State of Israel was itself founded on terrorism. They too had plundered and purged a people who, as it is historically reported, in contrast to the tea
ching of the Talmud or the Christian Bible, were actually the first homesteaders to the area. The Israelis would not give up their investment in the land or their annual contributions of millions of tax dollars from the United States, the payment of which Emily found very interesting indeed, particularly as the American public was, for the most part, totally unaware of it. As for Israel, even Golda Meir had noted there was no oil in this land. It was, for all intents and purposes, in Emily’s opinion, a massive tourist trap with little other than holy sites to offer. So why the fuss? It was a joke! Israel or Palestine represent all that is holy to the major players in world religion, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, just as Northern Ireland represents the religious fervor of Catholics and Protestants. All intricately connected and all out to extort the life’s blood from the people who had to live there.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

  Emily’s contacts throughout the Arab and Jewish world confirmed that with the acquisition of the names of fifteen Black September terrorists involved directly or indirectly with the Munich massacre, the Mossad, now in the process of the implementing the Meir directive had developed several separate assassination teams. Their piece de resistance however, as she had learned from other researchers like herself was disinformation, carefully contrived and leaked to western journalists. The press was discretely told that the teams were referred to as “Wrath of God”. This ploy was intended to destabilize the Black September hierarchy by alerting them that they were being hunted, both individually and collectively. So far it had proven extremely successful.

  At the behest of the British Government and MI6 and on the condition of utmost secrecy during the months of worldwide searching, Emily discovered that the primary targets of Black September had been located and Israel had issued instructions to immediately deploy the assassination teams. Five Mossad staff officers had been dispatched as the ‘engagement unit’ for the operation. Emily sent information to MI6 that individuals known as ‘regional assets” specially recruited by Israel were now acting as a support team to provide surveillance, safe houses and vehicles and to gather vital information on sensitive or protected foreign intelligence, as well as military, financial and political issues in case any “blowback” occurred as a result of the action.