Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  At about 4 A.M. on September 5, Black September stormed the Israeli team’s quarters. One of the athletes managed to escape. A wrestling coach, Moshe Weinberg, and a weight lifter, Yossef Romano, tried to resist the terrorists but were shot and killed. Their bodies were left lying on the floor for the next nine hours, in full view of the nine other members of the team, who were held hostage. Signs of severe mutilation were later found on Romano’s corpse.

  Massalha (Issa) conducted negotiations with representatives of the Bavarian state police and government as hundreds of millions of viewers across the globe looked on. That morning in Jerusalem, Golda Meir somberly informed the Knesset, “The murderers are demanding the release of two hundred terrorists from Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of the hostages.”

  As she had done in every case during her term as prime minister, Meir relied upon the judgment of the defense and intelligence establishments, with only one unequivocal stipulation: There would be no negotiations with terrorists, not under any circumstances.

  The Germans firmly refused to halt the Games, contending that West German TV has no alternative programming. “Incredibly, they’re going on with it,” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote. “It’s almost like having a dance at Dachau.”

  —

  A SAYERET MATKAL TEAM immediately began preparing a rescue operation. To Israel’s astonishment, though, the Germans—far less experienced in such matters—refused to allow the Israelis into the country. Two senior officials—Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and the chief of the Shin Bet interrogation department, Victor Cohen—were permitted to observe the negotiation only from a distance.

  Cohen, a native of Syria and a fluent Arabic speaker with a great deal of experience interrogating terrorists, was the man who had negotiated with the Black September hijackers of the Sabena jet. “In the Sabena affair, they let me work properly,” Cohen recalled. “From the conversations with the hijackers I was able to learn a lot: from their dialects, where they were from; from their choice of words, precisely what mood they were in; from the energy I felt, how alert they were. When I sensed they were getting tired, I told Sayeret Matkal that it was time to break in.”

  In Munich, however, Cohen and Zamir’s offers to counsel the Germans on how to handle the terrorists were repeatedly turned down. Instead, they watched as the surviving team members were led out of the dormitory building at gunpoint to two military Bell UH-1 helicopters parked nearby. The entire event left a deep impression in Zamir’s mind: “The sight of the athletes being led to the helicopters, I will never forget until the day I die. On both sides of the pathway, which was a kind of lawn, stood tens of thousands of people from innumerable countries. Deathly silence. I stood alongside [German interior minister Hans-Dietrich] Genscher and [Franz Josef] Strauss, Victor at my side, and we watched the Israeli athletes, with their hands tied, flanked by the terrorists, and all in step they marched toward the helicopters. It was an appalling sight, especially to a Jew on German soil, in Munich.”

  The helicopters took the hostages to a nearby military airport, where a plane was supposed to fly them out of Germany as soon as the deal for the release of the Palestinian prisoners had concluded. The terrorists and the hostages were followed by additional helicopters with Zamir and Cohen and the German officials aboard.

  Germany devised a rescue operation at the military airport, but the forces they deployed were untrained and disorganized, and they lacked the required intelligence on the terrorists, sniper equipment, and support for such a mission. They opened fire in an uncoordinated manner and did not hit or kill enough terrorists to neutralize the squad.

  “The terrorists fired at the building where we were,” Zamir said. “Victor and I ran down the stairs, groping in the dark, looking for the commanders of the operation, with firing going on all the time. We saw that the terrorists had shot the helicopter pilots, and they fell on their faces. When we located the [German] commanders [of the operation], I demanded to go up onto the roof to speak to the terrorists and warn them that if the firing continued, they would not get out alive. The officers refused, and we insisted, until they agreed on condition that we speak Arabic and not German.”

  Cohen took the megaphone and began trying to persuade the terrorists to surrender. “But it was too little and too late, and all I got was a burst of fire that nearly killed us both.”

  Zamir asked the Germans why there wasn’t a force storming the terrorists. He was told that the police were waiting for armored vehicles that were stuck on the way to the airport in a traffic jam created by all the curious onlookers.

  Zamir watched the terrorists lob grenades into the helicopters where the Israelis were being held; he saw them go up in flames after the grenades exploded. When he ran to the smoldering aircraft, he found only the nine Israelis’ bodies, handcuffed to one another, charred, and some still burning.

  To Zamir, the Germans’ conduct in the hostage situation was telling: “They did not make even a minimal effort to save lives, or take minimal risks to rescue people—neither our people nor their own.” He said he had seen one of the German pilots crying out for help. “I told [the German police], ‘For God’s sake, there are people bleeding in the helicopter. A wounded crewman has crawled two hundred meters. Get him out of there!’ He crawled on all fours, wounded, and no one made a move to rescue him.”

  According to Cohen, “Later on, we learned that some of the policemen who were supposed to take part in the rescue operation made a decision before it started that they were not ready to risk their lives for the sake of the Israelis.”

  Just after 3 A.M., barely twenty-three hours after the initial terrorist assault, Zamir phoned Meir, who congratulated him on his success. She had been misinformed by a German source that all the Israelis were safe. “I’m sorry to tell you this, Golda,” he told her, “but the athletes were not rescued. I have seen them all. Not one of them survived.”

  Almost immediately, historical parallels were drawn. Once again, Jews were slaughtered on German soil as the rest of the world continued with business as usual, as if nothing had happened. Worse, the State of Israel was rendered impotent by German authorities and forced to watch passively as terrorists slaughtered its citizens. In Israel, life came to a virtual standstill for days afterward. Rosh Hashanah celebrations all across the country were canceled, and a mood of gloom spread through the populace.

  The Palestinians saw the operation as a success, as their cause had taken center stage in world public attention. One PLO organ wrote, “A bomb in the White House, a land mine in the Vatican, the death of Mao Zedong, an earthquake in Paris could not have had greater resonance with every person in the world than that caused by the Black September operation in Munich….It was like painting the name ‘Palestine’ on a mountaintop visible from all corners of the globe.”

  In the immediate aftermath, there was little Meir’s government could do. It issued a pro forma declaration that, “in anger and revulsion, the Government of Israel deplores the murder of eleven Israelis by Arab terrorists.” Meir also ordered air strikes on a dozen “bases, camps, and headquarters of the terrorists in Syria and Lebanon. The intention is to harm terrorists and not civilians.”

  But that was only the beginning.

  On the evening of September 6, Zamir returned from Munich. In two briefings that were to have a dramatic impact on Israel’s future policy on terrorism, he described with emotion the attack and the German response—Germany’s refusal to accept assistance or advice, and the chaos, lack of professionalism, and apathy that the German forces displayed.

  “The German disgrace is immeasurable,” he said. All the Germans wanted was to get the affair out of the way so the Games could continue, he told a shocked cabinet.

  As Zamir’s account circulated, the fury toward the terror organizations spilling Jewish blood—as well as toward the German authorities who had failed so miserably and
refused to take responsibility—rose sharply. At a secret meeting of the Knesset panel, one of the participants seethed, “We must not only defend ourselves, but also go on the offensive. We have to seek out the terrorists and kill them. We have to turn them from the hunters to the prey.” Menachem Begin proposed bombing Libya.

  Meir, heavily criticized for the failure of the intelligence organizations under her command to detect and prevent the Munich massacre, and fearing for her chances of reelection, now came around. If the Europeans wouldn’t even try to stop the terrorists on their own soil, Meir and her cabinet decided, the Mossad would be given a green light to do so. On September 11, the cabinet authorized the prime minister to approve targets even in friendly countries, without notifying local authorities. “Retaliation or no retaliation,” Meir told the Knesset on September 12, “at any place where a plot is being laid, where they are preparing people to murder Jews, Israelis—Jews anywhere—it is there that we are committed to striking them.”

  Harari had been right: Meir changed her mind. Bayonet would be thrust into service immediately.

  “THE BEAUTIFUL SARAH HAS left the building and is making her way to her house.”

  This was the message transmitted over the Bayonet team’s radio network in Rome one night in October 1972. “Okay, get moving. Prepare to engage,” ordered Mike Harari from his command post.

  “The Beautiful Sarah” was not a woman, but the code name for a tall, thin, bespectacled man with a shock of shiny black hair and a very expressive face. His real name was Wael Zwaiter, and he was a Palestinian who worked part-time at the Libyan embassy in Rome as a translator. Zwaiter had nearly finished translating One Thousand and One Nights from Arabic to Italian, and he had spent the evening at the home of his friend Janet Venn-Brown, an Australian artist, discussing some of the finer points of his rendition of the colorful descriptions in the book. At the door, his hostess had given Zwaiter a loaf of bread she had baked for him. He put it into the envelope in which he kept his manuscript.

  After he left, he headed for his apartment at 4 Piazza Annibaliano. He took two buses, and when he got off the second one he went into a bar, all the time holding a white envelope containing the last chapters of his translation.

  A Bayonet surveillance team was watching Zwaiter the whole time. The Mossad believed he was not merely a translator—that this was only a cover and that he was, in fact, the commander of Black September operations in Rome. Italy was a particularly weak country when it came to counterterror enforcement, and Rome had become the European center of Palestinian terrorist activity at the time. The Mossad thought Zwaiter was responsible for smuggling in personnel and weaponry and selecting targets.

  The Mossad also suspected Zwaiter of having masterminded an attempt in September to plant a bomb on board an El Al flight from Rome. Italian authorities had their suspicions as well: In August, police briefly detained him in connection with Black September attacks against oil companies trading with Israel.

  Zwaiter left the café and headed home. The surveillance team radioed two of their comrades, confirming that the target was approaching. Zwaiter stepped into the dimly lit lobby of his apartment building and pressed the button for the elevator. He never saw the two assassins hiding in the shadows beneath the stairwell until it was too late. They pulled out Beretta pistols with silencers screwed to the barrels and shot Zwaiter eleven times. He was hurled backward by the impact of the bullets into a row of potted plants and fell to the ground, clasping his Arabian Nights manuscript. He died there on the floor.

  Within hours, all seventeen Bayonet operatives were out of Italy and on their way back to Israel. None of them had been caught. The operation had gone exactly as planned.

  Zwaiter was only the first on a very long list of militants and PLO staffers who were going to die.

  —

  THE CHANGE IN GOLDA Meir’s attitude toward friendly European countries was immediate and severe. Born in Kiev and raised in Milwaukee, she saw the world in straightforward and sometimes rigid terms: Things were either black or white, good or bad. In Meir’s mind, there was a direct link between the actions of the Palestinian terrorists and the atrocities of World War II: “Those who harm the Jews first harm other peoples later; that’s how it was with Hitler, and that’s the way it is with the Arab terrorists,” she said to the publisher of The New York Times, Arthur Sulzberger, Sr.

  She would blithely proclaim that she understood little about military affairs and intelligence—relying on Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, cabinet minister Yisrael Galili, and Mossad chief Zvi Zamir—but after the Munich slaughter she understood clearly enough that Israel could not depend on other countries to protect its citizens. Rather than defer to any nation’s sovereignty, Israel would now kill people wherever and whenever they reached the conclusion that it was necessary.

  This policy change had a significant effect on Caesarea’s operations. Prior to Munich, Meir had limited killings to “target” countries, those that were officially hostile to Israel, such as Syria and Lebanon. But it was difficult for Caesarea operatives to kill anyone in those countries because of the hazardous environment. Using a gun or a sniper rifle—methods that required close contact with the target—invariably drew quick attention from the local authorities, and even if the killers escaped cleanly from the scene, stringent border controls triggered by a high-profile murder would likely be put in place before they could leave the country. An Israeli assassin captured in a target country was likely going to die, and only after being brutally tortured. Distance killings might have been safer, but they also were less effective, vulnerable to many variables, and all too likely to kill or maim innocents.

  Operating in so-called base countries—those with friendly relations, which included all of Western Europe—was much more convenient. At most, an assassin who got caught would serve a prison term. Moreover, the Mossad’s Universe (Tevel) division, responsible for liaison with foreign intelligence bodies, had developed a network of close ties with many of Europe’s services, known in Mossad jargon as “soft cushions” because they could provide local contacts to help smooth things over in the event of complications—sometimes in return for a favor. The bottom line was that in Europe it was a lot easier to kill a man and get away with it.

  And there were a lot of men to kill. The first hit list consisted of eleven names: terrorists involved in the Munich massacre. It soon became clear that they were all holed up in Arab states or Eastern Europe, and it would be difficult to reach them. However, a lot of information had begun to accumulate in the meantime about other targets who were less important but who resided in Europe. After Munich, anyone the Mossad suspected of being involved with Black September—in effect, anyone suspected of belonging to the PLO in general—became a legitimate target. That made for a lengthy list of targets.

  “We wanted to create a noisy effect,” one Caesarea operative said. “A genuine assassination, from close range, that would evoke fear and trembling, a deed that, even if Israel denied having anything to do with, it would be clear that an Israeli finger squeezed the trigger.”

  That finger would belong to Bayonet. In mid-September 1972, Zvi Zamir showed up at Bayonet’s training center. “Israel is not going to sit idly by,” he told the operatives. “We are going to get the people who did this. You will be the long arm of the Office.”

  “Those words,” a Caesarea operative code-named Kurtz said, “roused a sense of pride in us.” Within a year of Munich, fourteen Palestinian militants would be dead.

  —

  THE LEADER OF THE hit teams and commander of some of its operations was Nehemia Meiri, a Holocaust survivor born to a traditional Jewish family in the village of Demblin, in southern Poland. He was twelve years old when the Gestapo rounded up the Jews of his village and marched them into a nearby forest. The Jews were ordered to dig a pit and forced to line up along its edge. Then they were machine-gunned. Nehemia,
already a resourceful and strong boy, dived into the pit a split second before the order to open fire was given. The Germans did not notice, and he lay quietly among the corpses of his family and neighbors until the killing was over. When the Germans were gone, he crawled out of the mass grave, soaked in blood.

  Later in the war, after Meiri was captured and forced into hard labor at an airstrip, he saved the life of a senior Luftwaffe officer who crashed his Messerschmitt on the runway. Meiri climbed into the burning aircraft and rescued the unconscious pilot, thereby buying himself years of protection. After the war, he immigrated to Palestine on the famous illegal immigrant ship Exodus. He fought in the 1948 War of Independence, was taken prisoner, and once again miraculously survived after a Jordanian soldier began mowing the POWs down.

  Afterward, he joined the Shin Bet, serving on Ben-Gurion’s bodyguard detail. His colleagues and superiors noted that he was coolheaded and had no moral qualms about killing anyone who harmed Jews.

  “Nehemia used to get up in the morning with a knife between his teeth,” one of his team members recalled.

  Meiri was a member of the Birds, the joint Mossad–Shin Bet operational team. He took part in the abduction of Alexander Yisraeli, the con man who tried to sell Israel’s secrets, and he participated in the campaign to assassinate and intimidate the Nazi scientists building Nasser’s missiles. Later on, he was transferred to Caesarea and assigned to the team that set up Bayonet. Eitan Haber, one of Israel’s best-known journalists, who also served as Yitzhak Rabin’s bureau chief, said he once chided Zamir for putting Meiri in Bayonet. It was immoral, Haber said, “an exploitation of Holocaust horrors in order to create a killing machine.”