On May 8, 1972, four terrorists—three from Black September and one from PFLP—hijacked a Sabena airliner carrying ninety-four passengers and seven crew members from Brussels to Tel Aviv. More than half of the passengers were Israelis or Jews. When the plane landed at Lod (now Ben-Gurion) Airport, the hijackers demanded that 315 of their terrorist comrades imprisoned in Israel be released.
Two different response plans were presented to Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. Meir Dagan and members of the Chameleon unit suggested that they shave their heads and pose as Arab prisoners, mingle with the other newly freed prisoners, and board the plane with them, then, once the hostages were safe, draw their concealed weapons and wipe out the terrorists—and, as Dagan proposed to the high command, “also the freed prisoners, if necessary.”
Dayan preferred the plan put forward by Ehud Barak, the commander of the Sayeret Matkal commando unit. Barak and his team approached the hijacked airplane in the guise of an airport ground crew, dressed in white overalls and carrying concealed Beretta .22 pistols. They then stormed the plane and killed or wounded all of the terrorists. A female passenger was killed in the firefight, and two others were injured. A young soldier by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu was also slightly wounded by a bullet fired by one of the other raiders.
The Sabena operation assumed mythic proportions in Israel. But despite its success, the Palestinians’ main strategic aim was achieved as well. “For an entire day,” a Black September commander said, “revolutionaries all over the world held their breath to see what would happen at the airport in occupied Palestine. The whole world was watching.”
Many of those revolutionaries soon rallied to the Palestinian cause. The new wave of terrorist activity elicited a huge surge in applications to join the underground organizations. According to one member of Black September, nearly all of these applications contained some variation of the phrase “At last you have found a way of making our voice heard in the world.”
These new recruits were used to devastating effect. On May 30, 1972, three members of the Japanese Red Army, underground leftists who’d been trained by the PFLP in North Korea and Lebanon, flew aboard an Air France flight from Rome to Lod Airport. Inside the Popular Front, there was some doubt whether their Maoist ideology was compatible with the Front’s Marxism, but the Palestinians were impressed by the readiness of the Japanese—or, more correctly, their ardent desire—to die for the cause.
They attracted no attention at the airport. The screeners that the Shin Bet had posted around El Al counters were on the lookout for nervous Middle Easterners, not Asian tourists.
The three Japanese men pulled AK-47s and hand grenades from their baggage and began firing indiscriminately into the crowded terminal. “I saw twenty-five people piled up in a pool of blood near conveyor belt number three,” one witness recalled. “One [man] stood near the belt with a submachine gun and fired across the entire length of the room. Another lobbed hand grenades whenever he saw people in large groups.”
The sounds of ambulances filled the streets of Tel Aviv for hours. Twenty-six people, seventeen of whom were Puerto Rican Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, were dead, and seventy-eight were wounded.
In a press conference in Beirut, Bassam Zayed, the PFLP spokesman (and the husband of Leila Khaled), defended the massacre of the pilgrims, declaring that it was the Front’s contention that there were no innocents—that all were guilty, if only because they had not “raised a finger for the Palestinians.” A feeling of bitter remorse permeated the Israeli defense establishment over the failure to prevent the massacre.
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THROUGHOUT THIS NEW WAVE of terror, Israel struggled to come up with an adequate response. Initially, in the absence of any definitive intelligence, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol ordered a punitive operation against a relatively easy target: Arab civil aviation. This was based on the argument that the Arab regimes that controlled these airlines were responsible for what was happening and were backing the PLO.
In December 1968, a task force raided the international airport in Beirut and blew up fourteen empty planes belonging to Middle East Airlines, Lebanese International Airways, and Trans Mediterranean Airways. The operation succeeded in that it destroyed the planes without Israeli casualties, but it had no real impact on deterring future terrorist attacks on Israeli civil aviation. And the international reaction to the Israeli raid against civilian targets was fierce. On top of a UN Security Council condemnation, French president de Gaulle tightened his country’s weapons embargo on Israel, canceling the sale of fifty fighter jets.
Further failures would follow. Intelligence information obtained by Junction identified a certain office in Beirut as the PLO headquarters in the city. On February 2, 1970, Caesarea operatives fired four RPG rockets from launchers fitted with timers into the windows of the offices. It turned out that the premises filled mainly an administrative function. “Some secretaries were wounded and some papers burned,” a Caesarea operative said, but that was about it. This was one of the first counterterror operations approved by Israel’s new prime minister, the redoubtable, hawkish Golda Meir, who had taken over the premiership after Levi Eshkol died, in February 1969.
Attempts to kill the founders of the PFLP were no more successful. Two Caesarea operatives were able to obtain the address of the apartment at 8 Muhi al-Din Street, in Beirut, that Wadie Haddad had used as both an office and a residence. “Haddad behaved like the lord of the manor in Beirut. There was no problem finding him—he wasn’t scared and he took no precautions,” said Zvi Aharoni, head of Caesarea. On July 10, Israeli naval commandos (Unit 707) debarked from a missile boat and landed on the beach near the Beirut Casino in a rubber dinghy and delivered two grenade launchers to the Caesarea assassins, who had rented an apartment opposite Haddad’s. At 9 A.M., one of them aimed the rockets at the window of a room where he’d seen Haddad sitting, pressed the button on the timer, which was set at thirty seconds, and fled the scene.
“But what can you do,” said Mike Harari. “Just then Haddad stepped into the other room, where his wife and kids were sitting, and he survived. Golda had ordered that not a hair on any innocent head should be harmed, otherwise we would have ‘shaved’ the whole floor.”
Meanwhile, an Israeli agent in Lebanon located George Habash’s villa at Bsaba, a mountainous area southeast of Beirut. He even photographed Habash sitting on his porch with some of his men. On July 15, an Israeli Air Force offensive was dispatched to bomb the house, but it struck and demolished a neighboring home instead. Habash escaped unharmed.
Shortly afterward, Aharoni resigned as head of Caesarea, partly due to the criticism leveled at him for not eliminating the terrorist chiefs. He was succeeded by Mike Harari.
Harari went straight for the top target: Yasser Arafat. Operation White Desert was Harari’s plan to assassinate the PLO leader at a celebration for Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in Libya on September 1, 1970. A VIP platform was constructed adjoining the wall of the old city of Tripoli, the capital. Several ideas were put forward in Caesarea: placing a mortar connected to a timer on the other side of the wall and then shelling the platform, where Arafat and other leaders would be seated, or placing explosives underneath the platform and detonating them after obtaining confirmation that Arafat was there. “Eventually we reached the conclusion that this was a problematic operation, because, along with Arafat, another 120 souls would be dispatched skyward. So we decided to go with a sniper.” Harari and his crew traveled to Libya a number of times to scout out the scene, rent safe houses, and plan escape routes.
Everything was ready to go when Mossad director Zvi Zamir brought the plan to Prime Minister Golda Meir for her final approval. But she feared that the operation would be pinned on Israel and would lead to severe international criticism and attempts to assassinate Israeli leaders. The plan was scrapped.
Disappointed, Harari sent two operatives to Europe, with order
s to reactivate the letter-bomb setup. These bombs “had two clear advantages,” Moti Kfir said. “They were easy to deliver to the target countries, because they looked harmless, and they provided a long getaway time—unlike gunfire, which attracts immediate attention.” The Israelis did manage to maim a couple of militants with these bombs, but it wasn’t long before PLO personnel learned to be more careful with their mail.
Fatah and its offshoots remained undeterred. And the Mossad’s primary targets—Arafat, Abu Jihad, Habash, Haddad—remained alive, healthy, and a perpetual menace.
In closed meetings of the Israeli leadership, fingers were pointed at the intelligence community for having failed to stop terrorist attacks or to deter future attacks. “When a bus blew up in Jerusalem, they looked at me,” said Harari. “Why don’t I blow up four buses in Beirut or Cairo? After all, whatever they did here in Israel we could have done to them in Cairo, Damascus, Amman, or wherever anyone wanted. I could have done it simultaneously. But I was not prepared to do that sort of operation, to sink to their level. We weren’t all that desperate. We looked for the selective strike, ones that the terrorists would know was Israeli but wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.”
In order to do that, Harari would have to overcome two significant obstacles. First, all the terrorist organizations’ headquarters were located in the capitals of Arab states, which gave them asylum in places where it was very difficult for Caesarea to operate. Second, Caesarea’s men at that time were simply not suited to the task. James Bond films and their ilk tend to portray spies as a homogenous lot—the same person can be a mole, an assassin, a break-in artist, and a surveillance expert, both gathering intelligence and analyzing it for the decision-makers. Reality, especially in the Mossad, is very different. Caesarea’s operatives had been trained to carry out long-term assignments under deep cover. They were supposed to attract as little attention as possible, to have as little friction as possible with local actors, and to gather as much information as they could, so that Israel would have advance notice of any forthcoming war. “My people were not commandos,” Harari said. “I would look for someone who could spend time in Cairo as an archaeologist and invite Nasser on a tour of his digs, or a woman who could serve as a nurse in a military hospital in Damascus. These people didn’t have the training to take out a sentry, to draw a pistol or to throw a knife. In order to fight terror, I needed different people and other kinds of weaponry.”
The PLO’s transition into global activity also created a political challenge for the Israelis. European countries did not combat terror themselves during those years, and they didn’t allow the Israelis to do so within their borders, either. The Europeans viewed the Middle East conflict as remote and inconsequential, and had no incentive to act. The Mossad gathered hundreds of tips about planned terror operations against Israeli and Jewish targets in Europe, but to deal with them, it needed the assistance of friendly European intelligence services. “We inform them of it once, twice, three times, or five times,” Golda Meir explained at a secret meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, “and nothing happens.”
Frustration was building within the Mossad. “I don’t get why we sit here quietly while, every day, terrorists are plotting how to kill Jews,” Avraham “Romi” Porat, the intelligence officer of Caesarea, complained during a meeting in Mossad HQ. “We know where they are. Their offices in Germany and France and Italy and Cyprus are public knowledge. They don’t even try to hide. Let’s blow up one of their offices for every plane hijacking, and ‘the land shall have rest for forty years,’ ” he said, quoting the Bible’s book of Judges.
Harari’s solution was to set up a special team within Caesarea that wasn’t tasked with gathering intelligence prior to hostilities but rather was focused on “operating covertly and carrying out identification, surveillance, and execution of human targets and sabotage operations.” The unit would be code-named Kidon (Bayonet), and it would function mainly in Western Europe and in democratic countries elsewhere.
The nucleus of Bayonet actually first began to take shape in mid-1969, under the command of an operative named Danny, but for many years Harari could not employ it in the field and had to limit its activities just to training and to working out a combat doctrine. Golda Meir, though wary of Western countries, nevertheless respected their sovereignty. She understood that otherwise friendly nations would never cooperate with Israel if it carried out targeted killings in their territory without their permission. In her words, European intelligence services “can decide what is permissible and what is forbidden on their territory….There are friendly countries that say, ‘You won’t do it here; here we are the masters.’ All of this is not simple. It’s not our country.”
Harari, who was convinced that Meir would eventually change her mind, quietly ordered Bayonet to continue its training. “In the end,” Harari told Zamir, “we’ll have no alternative but to kill them in Europe.” Zamir agreed that training should be continued. “We respected the prime minister’s policy, and therefore we only made information-gathering efforts, and prepared the personnel and the weaponry that would be required in the future.”
This regimen of training and preparation was arduous. Recruits had to be adept at rapid movement, driving cars or motorbikes, tailing and getting rid of tails, breaking into buildings, and hand-to-hand combat. They also had to be able to function calmly under a variety of combat conditions. They were drilled in pistol marksmanship, with an emphasis on a method known as instinct shooting. Developed in part by a U.S. Army veteran named Dave Beckerman, who had helped liberate Dachau, it is based on speedy movement from rest to a firing position or attaining maximum accuracy while firing on the move.
Then recruits needed training in one more skill: makeup. Because most Bayonet missions would be short-term, various disguises could be used in order to change identities. According to Yarin Shahaf, who currently trains Mossad operatives in the craft of makeup, this is a complicated task: “You have to make sure that the mustache won’t fall off even in a fight and that the wig fits and won’t fly off even in a chase over rooftops. The warrior has to know how to put it on so that it looks believable, and also to clean himself up quickly if he has to escape.”
Finally, a recruit would undergo one last test. The agency would send him home, to his own neighborhood and his own social circle, in disguise and with his alias. If he could circulate there, among those who knew him best, without being identified, he was deemed capable of operating in a hostile nation of strangers.
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IN EARLY JULY 1972, eight members of Black September arrived at a training camp in the Libyan desert commanded by Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, chief of the security-and-information apparatus of Fatah. The eight had all been Fatah activists and were chosen for a variety of reasons. Some had extensive combat experience. Others were familiar with Europe in general and Germany more specifically. Among these men was Mohammed Massalha, born in 1945, the son of the first head of the council of the Galilee village of Daburiyya. Fluent in both German and English and older than the others, he wasn’t a fighter but rather served as the ideologue and spokesman for the group. The voice and figure of Massalha, who was given the code name Issa, would soon become famous all over the world.
In the Libyan camp, the eight men were met by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad), the founder of Black September, and Mohammed Oudeh (Abu Daoud), a longtime Fatah operative who was a trustworthy and capable confidant of Abu Iyad’s. The latter informed them that they were about to take part in a highly important operation, without revealing precisely what that operation was. For the next few weeks the group underwent training in firearms, including pistols, submachine guns, and grenades, as well as hand-to-hand combat and fitness. Special stress was placed on disguise. They were given code names and forged Libyan passports and were instructed to hide their faces throughout the operation and to change their clothing frequently, in order to give th
ose watching them the impression that there were many more members of the group.
Israeli intelligence completely missed these preparations in Libya. On July 7, a Palestinain agent code-named Lucifer warned the Mossad that “Black September is planning an attack in Europe,” and he reported on August 5 that “Black September is preparing an operation of an international nature.” But he had no details. And so many terror alerts and tips were flooding the Mossad’s research department that, inevitably, more than a few were overlooked. Lucifer’s was among those that fell through the cracks.
On September 3 and 4, the eight Black September militants took separate flights into West Germany. They rendezvoused in Munich, where the 1972 Olympic Games were under way, watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world. The PLO, on behalf of the stateless Palestinians, had asked to participate but had been turned down by the International Olympic Committee. “Apparently, from the point of view of this reputable body, which pretends to be apolitical, we didn’t exist,” Khalaf said later. “The leadership of Black September decided to take things into its own hands.”
On the eve of the operation, at a restaurant near the Munich railroad station, Oudeh finally told them the plan. The eight men drew up a joint last will and testament and joined Oudeh to collect weapons and explosives that had been smuggled in from Spain and Sweden and hidden in a locker at the railroad station. Oudeh collected their passports and sent them to gate number A25 of the Olympic Village. They easily climbed over the fence and walked to Connollystrasse 31, where the Israeli delegation to the Games was housed. At the time, there were thirty-two policemen in the village—two with handguns but the rest unarmed, because the German hosts wanted to create as peaceful and pacifistic an atmosphere as possible. None of them noticed what was happening.
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