Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response

by Klein, Aaron J.

  By the end of 1972 Caesarea had expanded and evolved. Harari now had three assassination squads of roughly a dozen people each at his disposal. The teams had a basic structure, but were shaped to organically fit each individual mission. There were always three squads—logistics, surveillance, and assassination. The logistics squad rented apartments, drove the cars, spoke the local language, and was in charge of communications—a tedious chore in those days, involving complex codes. The surveillance team, frequently the largest, had many female members (who often acted as parts of “couples”). Their job was to blend into their surroundings. They employed very basic tactics, switching glasses, hats, wigs, and outerwear. As one former Caesarea combatant told me: “We were supposed to walk on the shadow of life.” The final component of each group were the assassins. They were combatants trained in pairs and referred to as “number 1” and “number 2,” generally well-prepared young men from topflight army units.

  All members of Caesarea led secret lives even within the Mossad. They were the most elite arm of Israel’s defense forces, and they were reminded of this often. They were told that they were fulfilling the express wishes of the prime minister. The country was behind them.

  As the Mossad’s strength grew, so too did the Palestinians’ ability to vanish. The chase intensified, becoming more complicated. Targets disappeared, swallowed by the earth.

  Some claimed that Hamshari’s assassination was carried out in a deliberately extravagant manner, strengthening the Mossad’s deterrent message. In fact, the spy agency’s goal was success and safety, not flash. “If I could take them down with a missile from twenty miles away, I would,” an ex-Caesarea officer explained to me. “It isn’t the method that’s important, even if it is interesting and fascinating, it’s the end result that counts. The goal was to intercept and prevent. We checked what he had done in the past, and what damage he could inflict in the future. We acted according to this analysis.”

  Chief of Staff Lieutenant General David Elazar spoke before the Israel Defense College’s graduating class on December 19, 1972, nine days after Hamshari’s assassination in Paris. The Mossad never publicized its role in European assassinations, but Elazar wanted to make a point. “Whoever reads the papers,” he said, “will see Arab hands involved in the death of a number of Arabs in different countries. If you look closely, you will see the Jewish thumbprint in the middle of the mix.”

  22 THE SLIPPERY SLOPE

  NICOSIA, CYPRUS, OLYMPIC HOTEL THURSDAY, JANUARY 25, 1973

  Fatah wasn’t flying the white flag. Their search for weak links in Israel’s defenses took them to Thailand, where they found a vulnerable Israeli embassy. Months prior, the remote embassy had received new security directives, but the Thai pace of affairs, their distance from Europe, and the fact that Thailand was low on Israel’s list of priorities all contributed to the laissez-faire security deployment at the embassy. On December 28, 1972, four armed Palestinians sent by Ali Hassan Salameh breezed past security and walked through a set of unlocked doors into the embassy’s main hall. They took four Israeli men and two women hostage, throwing them into a third-floor room with their hands bound. The Israeli ambassador, Rechavam Amir, and his wife were not among them. The couple had gone out two hours earlier, to attend the coronation of Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn.

  The terrorists floated their typewritten demands down to the Thai police waiting below. Black September demanded the release of thirty-six prisoners from Israeli jails. Their list included Kozo Okamoto, serving a life sentence for his role in the Lod Airport attack one and a half years earlier, and Rimah Tanoos and Teresa Khalsa, the two surviving perpetrators of the foiled Sabena attack, both not yet one year into long prison sentences.

  The Israeli ambassador returned to the besieged embassy in the company of the Thai prime minister, Thanom Kittikachorn; the Thai chief of staff; and several government ministers. The Thai leaders, all veterans of the armed forces, were enraged by the timing of the attack. Thailand was the only Southeast Asian country that had never been colonized. Their monarchs were still revered. A rolling coin with the likeness of the king was always picked up with a hand, never stopped with an unclean foot. The disruption of the coronation ceremony was a serious affront. The Thais and the Israeli ambassador (who had conducted a quick consultation with the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem) were of one mind regarding the terrorists’ demands—they would not capitulate.

  The stalemate was broken by an unlikely source: Mustafa Issawi, the Egyptian ambassador. On directives from President Anwar Sadat, he took an active role in the thirty-hour negotiations with the terrorists. Issawi succeeded in convincing the terrorists to leave Thailand; their preliminary demands were unfulfilled, but two months later, as if disconnected, the Israeli government released several Palestinian corpses to Lebanon, as a gesture of “gratitude to Thailand.” The four terrorists released the six Israeli hostages at the Bangkok airport and boarded a Thai plane to Egypt. The Egyptian ambassador flew with them, guaranteeing their safety with his presence as he had promised. As the Thai DC-8 flew to Cairo, five Israeli officers landed in Bangkok after twenty-four hours of travel. They were there to plan a rescue mission for an Israeli commando team that was on its way. Diplomatic negotiations allowing Sayeret Matkal commandos to operate in Thailand were ongoing. The Israeli government was ready to do all in its power to avoid another tragic end to a hostage situation.

  The Black September attack on the Israeli embassy in Bangkok was quickly forgotten, both in Israel and abroad. The terrorists’ surrender to the Egyptian pressure was surprising. In Beirut, Ali Hassan Salameh was enraged by the operation’s failure. He wanted another attack that would put the Palestinian predicament back in the limelight, highlighting the importance of Fatah and Black September.

  At Mossad headquarters, the search for assassination candidates continued at a frantic pace. A connection to Munich, direct or indirect, was not a prerequisite for consideration. At the time, many in the Mossad believed that those who preached violence were as bad as those who practiced or aided it; both were legitimate targets. In mid-January, Prime Minister Meir authorized another targeted killing, the third since Munich. Hussain Abu-Khair, thirty-six, the newly appointed PLO envoy to Nicosia, Cyprus, was sentenced to death. He too was a soft target: he lived in a hotel (he had been in Cyprus for two months but had yet to rent an apartment), had no weapon or bodyguard, and didn’t seem to fear bodily harm. A Caesarea surveillance team trailed him for close to two weeks without seeing any security detail, or any attentiveness on his part. Apparently he didn’t think he was important enough to warrant the attention of the Mossad.

  Abu-Khair had served as Fatah liaison to the Soviet KGB. Since the late 1960s, Nicosia had been crawling with all kinds of cloak-and-dagger characters. No self-respecting spy agency dared to pass on sending an envoy to the region. Russian, American, East German, Spanish, British, Bulgarian, Syrian, Egyptian, Palestinian, and Israeli agents walked the streets of the shady capital. Many of them ran their Middle East missions from the island. Dodgy agents, traitors, double-dealers, backstabbers, and murderers played spy games on this sun-drenched island. Occasionally a bullet-riddled body would turn up. The Cypriot authorities chose not to interfere—which was, all nations tacitly acknowledged, the preferred response.

  Abu-Khair returned to the Olympic Hotel on President Makarios Avenue just before midnight, January 25, 1973. He had no idea that one of Zvi Malchin’s Keshet operatives had sneaked into his room and placed an explosive device beneath his bed. As was the case with Hamshari, this device could be remotely activated. A Caesarea combatant waited in a car outside the hotel for word from the surveillance team that the mark had entered his room. He saw Abu-Khair’s light flick on and off. The combatant gave him a minute to grope for his bed in the dark and then flipped the switch. The ensuing explosion ripped the man apart. Harari, who had been supervising the mission from a nearby hotel room, left the country along with his staff officers and the assassination t
eam; they were back in Israel within hours.

  That morning, the telephone had woken Ankie Spitzer. An unidentified man ordered her to listen to the news at 10 o’clock.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Never mind,” he said. “This is for Andrei.”

  He hung up.

  The news announced that a mysterious explosion had killed the Fatah representative in Nicosia. Ankie would receive more such calls in the future.

  The following day, R., Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, opened a cabinet in his room on the eleventh floor of the Hadar Dafna Building. Inside was a row of photographs—Abu-Khair’s was lined up just to the right of photos of Hamshari and Zu’aytir. R. drew an X through the photo of Abu-Khair. Harari watched R. work. We’re on a roll, he thought. Many other photos sat propped to the left of Abu-Khair’s. Who was next in line?

  Individual Caesarea combatants executed missions. They were the ones the politicians alluded to when they waved their hands in the air, trumpeting Israel’s ability to reach terrorists wherever they hid. But the aftershocks of Munich didn’t affect only the people in the Mossad, Shabak, and Military Intelligence: it transformed the agencies themselves, their habits and their ability to cooperate. Before Munich, each intelligence agency operated on its own, in virtual isolation. Now heads of divisions, units, and wings understood that egos and institutional rivalries had to be cast aside in favor of interagency cooperation. Aharon Yariv, advisor to the prime minister on terrorism, worked tirelessly to smooth the rough patches and create a positive atmosphere during the many tense interagency meetings.

  When a direct, underground line was laid between Military Intelligence’s Branch 4 shacks and the Hadar Dafna Mossad Facha division—only three hundred yards away and, till then, a world apart—a breakthrough in cooperation was achieved. “It was a direct line, without operators or other barriers, which was also progress,” a senior Military Intelligence source told me. “We also thought of computerizing our personnel files in an attempt to solve the four-sided problem of matching a name to a person. Every Arab name has four components: his first name, his father’s name, his grandfather’s name, and his clan name. If you catch a piece of information about a person, but all you have is a first name and sometimes also a family name, it might be impossible to find out who he is. Back then you couldn’t cross-reference with the push of a button. It took endless research and thought to make a full name, but it was worth it because the name is the building block, the first step toward cracking a case. A full name led to many targets and operations. Back then we tried to computerize our personnel files but the technical problems were too great. We didn’t do it, but the possibility of cooperation was something new and worthwhile.”

  The agencies were not ready for total cooperation, however. “In early 1973 I went to Aharon Yariv with a detailed plan to construct a command center, maybe we would call it ‘Terror War Room,’” my source said. “It would be open twenty-four hours a day and it would serve and be run by all of the intelligence agencies. Yariv looked at me with those blue eyes and after a few beats of silence said, ‘What you’re proposing is totally impossible. We should make it happen, but we won’t; we’re not there yet.’”

  Military Intelligence was used to anticipating war. They carefully watched army maneuvers and troop movements across the hostile countries to the north, east, and south. But after Munich Lieutenant Colonel Mor began issuing a weekly Hostile Terror Activity Report, known in Hebrew as Facha, an acronym that has become part of the everyday vocabulary. The weekly report went to the prime minister, the chief of staff, the defense minister, the head of Military Intelligence, the Shabak, and the Mossad. It included new alerts for pending terrorist attacks, statistics on terrorist activity, analysis of collected information, and, occasionally, a detailed indictment of suspected terrorists.

  A senior intelligence source told me, “Our blood was boiling. Everything that pertained to terrorism was hot. We were on an assignment given to us directly by the prime minister. Sometimes pressure from the operational branches bent the will of the analysts. It’s not that they said target X is worthless and we still decided to kill him, but when there was information implicating someone we didn’t inspect it with a magnifying glass.

  “You didn’t need blood on your hands for us to assassinate you. If there was intelligence information, the target was reachable, and if there was an opportunity, we took it. As far as we were concerned we were creating deterrence, forcing them to crawl into a defensive shell and not plan offensive attacks against us. But in this field there is also a slippery slope. Sometimes decisions are made based on operational ease. It’s not that the assassinated were innocent, but if a plan existed, and those were often easiest for the soft targets, you were condemned to death.”

  23 THE SHADOW WARS CONTINUE

  MADRID, CAFÉ MORRISON FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 1973, 0900H

  Baruch Cohen, a talented katsa, arrived in Israel for a short visit in January 1973. He had been stationed in Brussels, Belgium, for the past two years. The risks he took working undercover left him frayed. A chance encounter with an old friend prompted him to reveal what had been weighing on his mind for months. “I die inside every time I think that my kids might grow up without their father.” Two weeks later, on January 26, this father of four was killed in Madrid. One of his veteran sources, a Palestinian turncoat who had been “flipped” back by Black September, lured him to his death.

  Baruch Cohen was thirty-six years old when he was killed. His family had lived in Haifa for five generations; he spoke Arabic with his parents and felt at ease in an Arab home. At twenty-three, one year after his army service, he joined the Shabak, working as a case officer in the field. He did his best work in Nablus’s casbah and the surrounding refugee camps, eventually rising to the position of station chief. All the locals recognized him, calling him Captain. Tzomet requested his services in 1970, recognizing that beyond his natural talents as a charismatic and confidence-inspiring case officer, his familiarity with the territories and Palestinian life in general would help him recruit homesick students abroad.

  The Palestinian cream of the crop was educated in Europe. There, the shock of the West brought insularity. Students shared apartments and dorms, shopped at the same stores, and hung out at the same nightclubs. Amidst the uncovered women and the bland food, they carved out their own world. For Fatah’s Black September and the Marxist Palestinian terror organizations this was fertile ground for recruitment. The students who joined their ranks—often just looking for a familiar environment—were an integral part of Palestinian terror organizations’ European infrastructures.

  In 1972, there were approximately six thousand Palestinians in West Germany (out of 55,000 Arabs total), the majority of them students. The situation in Italy, France, Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia was similar. One Palestinian agent, in an interview on September 25, 1972, in Beirut with James Bell of Time magazine, explained, “We are everywhere now. We are all over Western Europe, and there are many Palestinians among the 12,000 Arab students in the U.S. We have our own businesses like a diplomatic nightclub in Rome, which the authorities closed last April. But there are a lot more. There are travel agencies that can arrange things. There are laundries and grocery stores. But of course, these businesses are not solely businesses. They are also collection agencies, mail drops, meeting places, points of contact.”

  The Mossad fished from the same irresistible pond. While the Palestinian resistance groups used homesickness and patriotism as their lures, the Mossad baited with cash. Poor people were more likely to listen to an offer. Tzomet received a steady stream of information from the Shabak about the families of students pursuing degrees abroad. They knew which side of the law they were on; who their friends were; where they stood on nationalism and religion; and how much money their family had under the floorboards.

  Cohen didn’t stumble for words when he first approached a potential source. He would role-play for days, rehear
sing dozens of possible scenarios. He would never introduce himself as an Israeli. A man would betray his homeland for the right reason, but giving information to a Zionist was the greatest possible treason. Cohen would say he worked for NATO or Spain or Egypt. He would inquire about the health of his target’s family, asking specifically about an elderly relative. He would know if his target was gay, sex-starved, homesick, or in debt. He would find out if the person had a lifelong desire and then dangle it before his eyes. He would know if his mother was sick and offer a cure—perhaps admittance to a European hospital—in exchange for just a few short answers. He would have an abundance of Middle Eastern cakes and cookies on hand. He would play popular music. If he thought it would help relax his target, he would step out of a hotel room and a one-hundred-dollar-an-hour hooker would walk in. Baruch Cohen’s job was to read and rule the mind of his source. All he wanted was to have a little talk.

  In the summer of 1970 Cohen moved with his wife, Nurit, and his four children, the youngest of whom, Michal, was four, to Brussels. The Belgian capital was his base, but he traveled all across the continent. On light workweeks he would leave his family on Monday, returning on Friday for Sabbath. He spent time at the universities and cafés frequented by young Palestinians. There were other katsas working parallel beats, artfully persuading individuals to betray their people, exposing themselves to immense risk.