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

by Klein, Aaron J.

  Since Munich, Cohen and his peers in Tzomet were under pressure to recruit as many sources as possible. The gap between what was needed to create a map of Palestinian terrorism in Europe and what they knew was vast. There was no starker example than the Munich Massacre, a high-profile attack Israel knew nothing about. Fatah had been on the offensive since early 1972, striking hard and often at Israeli targets abroad. Their attacks were bold and aimed at Israel’s weakest points. The HUMINT produced by Cohen and his peers was Israel’s first line of defense. They were the ones charged with blocking the terrorists’ advances. Despite the Mossad’s assassination campaign, highly motivated terrorists were not—or not yet—in short supply. The only way to stop them was by foiling their plans through superior knowledge.

  On the eve of his death, Cohen called his wife in Brussels and told her that he would be a day late. “I’ll be back on Friday, before Shabbat, around six,” he said. Nurit did not know where he was calling from, or what false name he was living under. After more than ten years of marriage to a man in the secret service she knew not to probe. Occasionally when he returned to Brussels, she would let curiosity get the better of her, and would ask where he had been. Cohen would grunt out the name of a place—London, Vienna, Berlin. She never went further, never asked: and what did you do there?

  The next morning, in downtown Madrid, Cohen met Samir, a Palestinian student and Fatah activist he had cultivated as a reliable source, at Café Morrison, on Calle José Antonio. As they were leaving the café two men suddenly approached them. Cohen’s informant broke into a run. Cohen understood what was happening, but had no time to react. Three quick rounds slammed into his chest. A fourth, errant bullet hit a pedestrian. Cohen collapsed on the sidewalk, in a pool of his own blood, his internal organs ruptured. The two gunmen escaped with the double agent. Passersby dispersed in a flash. The Madrid police arrived on the scene minutes later. An ambulance carried Cohen to the Francisco Franco Hospital, where he died on the operating table.

  That evening Black September published a notice heralding the assassination of an Israeli Mossad agent by the name of Uri Molov. The Israeli passport Cohen carried in his pocket said Moshe Hanan Yishai. Initial media reports stated an Israeli citizen by that name had been murdered in Madrid. Since the state of Israel and Spain, under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, had no official ties, the Israelis preferred that Cohen’s real name be kept secret. Only when the corpse was returned to Israel did the government publicize his identity. The prime minister’s office issued an obituary for Cohen.

  The media interpreted Cohen’s murder as Black September’s revenge for Zu’aytir, Hamshari, and Abu-Khair. The connection was coincidental. Black September’s mission to assassinate Cohen had been devised months before. It was about feasibility, not retribution.

  The officers at Tzomet headquarters in Tel Aviv were devastated. In the four months since the attempt on Tzadok Ofir’s life, Tzomet had been scrambling to protect its officers abroad. Its plan called for each meeting between a katsa and his source, anywhere in the world, to be watched by a trained bodyguard. This logistically complex procedure would take a year to implement fully. Cohen fell between the cracks. His source, Samir, was considered reliable, which made their meeting a low priority.

  The man who betrayed Cohen was put on the Mossad hit list and marked for death.

  More than a decade later a Mossad officer tracked Samir down in Tunis. He walked past his house. The head of the Mossad at the time did not authorize his assassination. It was too risky.

  24 ASSASSINATION IN KHARTOUM

  KHARTOUM, SUDAN, SAUDI EMBASSY MARCH 1, 1973, 2100H

  Fatah had not lost sight of enemy number one—the Jordanian king and his regime. As Palestinian terror swept across Europe, Fatah officials in Beirut drafted an audacious plan to overthrow Jordan’s King Hussein. The plan called for thirty-two terrorists—an unprecedented number—to storm the office of the Jordanian prime minister and take him and several government ministers hostage. Then they would booby-trap all the exits with explosives. With the hostages trapped and under their control, they would demand the release of one thousand of their compatriots rotting in Jordanian jails. The king would be ambushed and killed on his way to the exchange site. Abu-Daoud, the mastermind behind the Munich attack, was chosen by Abu-Iyad to command the mission. Their goal: to destabilize the Hashemite state and claim it as their own.

  In February 1973, Abu-Daoud arrived in Amman, Jordan, carrying forged papers and dressed as a wealthy Saudi sheik. He was accompanied by a young woman posing as one of the rich sheik’s wives. The Jordanian intelligence service, one of the world’s best in gathering HUMINT, followed them closely from the moment they entered the country. Days later the pair were stopped at what seemed like a random roadblock. It was a trap. The two were taken into custody and interrogated immediately. A Jordanian intelligence source, a high-ranking Fatah member, had informed his handlers that Abu-Daoud was on his way to Jordan to case the prime minister’s office.

  Abu-Daoud broke under interrogation, revealing all the details of the planned coup. Abu-Daoud also spoke freely about the Munich attack, telling British TV reporters and Jordanian radio all about the perfectly planned strike. Black September was dealt a triple blow: not only had their most ambitious plan to date been thwarted, but an unidentified mole, somewhere in the upper echelons of their command structure, continued to operate, unobstructed. Fatah’s Black September leaders in Beirut and Damascus felt like their every move was being watched by the Jordanians. In addition, their top operational guy was captured. At the close of a swift military trial Abu-Daoud was found guilty and sentenced to death.

  Abu-Iyad, both friend and commander to Abu-Daoud, was prepared to do anything in his power to bring the Jordanian wheels of justice to a halt. He hastily planned and authorized a deadly attack. On the first of March, seven Palestinian terrorists, armed with AK-47s, grenades, and pistols, left Beirut for Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Ten hours later, they stormed the Saudi embassy while the ambassador hosted a party for George C. Moore, the homeward-bound American deputy chief of mission. Guests poured out of the house, escaping through the garden as the terrorists charged through the front gate. Within minutes the group controlled the building. The commander of the raid sorted through the captives and kept only the most valuable: Cleo A. Noel, American ambassador to Sudan; George C. Moore; Guy Eid, the Belgian chargé d’affaires; and his Jordanian and Saudi counterparts.

  The terrorists’ list of demands was familiar: the Germans must release a number of Baader-Meinhof operatives; the Americans, Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian murderer of Robert F. Kennedy; the Israelis must free a host of prisoners, including the two women captured during the Sabena takeover; and, finally, the Jordanians were required to open the death row cell of Mohammed Oudeh, aka Abu-Daoud. If their demands were not met the hostages would be shot.

  Golda Meir, King Hussein, and U.S. president Richard Nixon refused to bargain with the terrorists. Nixon delivered a televised address, announcing that the United States would not bow to extortion. Thirty-six hours later, without any prior communication, the terrorists rounded up the two U.S. diplomats and their Belgian counterpart and executed them in the basement of the embassy. Each man was shot dozens of times. Twenty-four hours later the terrorists released the two Arab diplomats and surrendered to Sudanese forces.

  The tight timetable for the operation had taken its toll; Black September had made many uncharacteristic mistakes. The Sudanese president, Colonel Jaafar Numeiry, furious that an attack had taken place in his capital city, sent officers to comb through the PLO offices in Khartoum. They found that Fawwaz Yassin, the head of the PLO mission, had fled the country hours before the attack, leaving behind a sketch of the Saudi embassy that he himself had made. Further: an official PLO Land Rover had been used to drive the terrorists to the embassy, and the commander of the attack was in fact the PLO’s number two man in Khartoum.

  The investigation’s findings—wh
ich were highly publicized—proved that Black September and Fatah were inextricably linked, that the former was merely an unofficial arm of the latter. Many branches of American and European intelligence agencies were forced to reckon with this uncomfortable fact after Khartoum. The Sudanese investigation also proved that PLO diplomats, contrary to beliefs widely held at the time, did not abstain from terror attacks and did not confine their area of operations to Israel and the Occupied Territories. They worked as saya’ans and were quite willing to dirty their hands for the cause. These revelations damaged Fatah’s image abroad—they could no longer be seen simply as freedom fighters taking up arms solely against their Israeli occupiers. Killing unarmed diplomats in a basement did not play well in the international media. The week after the murder of the diplomats Time magazine published an article about the incident. It was titled “A Blacker September.”

  25 ANOTHER MAN DOWN IN PARIS

  PARIS, ACROSS FROM THE MADELEINE CHURCH FRIDAY, APRIL 6, 1973, 2100H

  Dr. Basil Al-Kubaisi’s file was one of the thickest in Caesarea’s system. It was crammed with intelligence bulletins, evaluations, plans, memos, notes. A black-and-white photo of Al-Kubaisi in a dark suit hung inside chief intelligence officer R.’s cabinet. The Mossad had identified the man as a clever and evasive saya’an. Despite his role in lethal terror attacks, he remained a soft target: he visited European cities, had no security guard, and kept to a semipredictable routine. Several Caesarea surveillance teams had been trailing Al-Kubaisi since December 1972. He visited Paris regularly, in love with the City of Light. He would stay for a few days, take no obvious measures to avoid surveillance, and then vanish. Days later, the Facha division would learn from gathered intelligence that Al-Kubaisi was planning to return to Paris. The surveillance crews would be dispatched once again to trail him, only to be stymied yet again. The game of cat and (blithely unaware) mouse continued for three months. At the time it was one of Caesarea’s longest ongoing missions.

  Dr. Basil Al-Kubaisi, forty, had a perfectly manicured mustache and soft eyes. He looked incapable of committing the sorts of crimes the Mossad accused him of. An Iraqi, he was a left-wing law professor who believed in Pan-Arabism and sided with the Palestinian cause for ideological reasons. He was probably not affiliated with Fatah’s Black September and certainly had no hand in the Munich Massacre. There was nothing extreme in his appearance; his clothes were fit for the academy, he was elegant and well kempt. But according to Branch 4 and the Mossad’s intelligence, he helped the PFLP smuggle weapons and explosives for Western European terror attacks, slipping across borders and past customs officials without arousing suspicion. Raw intelligence data implied that his involvement in terrorism stretched back to the days of the Iraqi monarchy. In 1956, Al-Kubaisi was allegedly involved in a plot to kill King Faisal with a booby-trapped car, positioned along the king’s route. A delay in the monarch’s convoy saved the king’s life, but forced Al-Kubaisi to flee Iraq. He made it to Beirut and from there to America and then Canada, where he received his doctorate in international law.

  In 1971, Al-Kubaisi returned to the Middle East. Denied entry to his homeland, he took up residence in the then cosmopolitan hub of the Levant, Beirut, teaching law at the American University and affiliating himself with the PFLP. Various sources in the PFLP claimed that Al-Kubaisi was involved in the planning of a string of attacks along America’s eastern seaboard. On March 6, 1973, Al-Kubaisi allegedly aided and assisted a PFLP team that placed a car packed with explosives close to the El Al terminal at New York’s JFK Airport on the day that Golda Meir was due to land. The car was discovered before her arrival. Intelligence data also showed him to be a senior member of George Habash’s PFLP and one of the planners of the attack at Lod Airport in 1972. Israeli Military Intelligence, the Mossad, and Aharon Yariv believed that the amassed intelligence before them warranted Al-Kubaisi’s death. He had a terrorist past, a terrorist present, and in all likelihood a terrorist future. All agreed that liquidating the talented saya’an would prevent future attacks and send the required message to those devoted to the terrorist cause. It was time for him to meet his maker. Prime Minister Golda Meir and the defense cabinet authorized the mission.

  In early April 1973, Caesarea’s surveillance crews caught up with Al-Kubaisi in a small Parisian hotel adjacent to the lovely Madeleine Church. The surveillance teams had studied his daily routine, recording his every move, and Caesarea’s “Senate,” their forward command center in Europe, had rushed to complete an assassination plan. After seven months of intensive action in the field, Caesarea’s surveillance and hit teams were in good form—professional and quick. Their hands-on experience kept the tension low and their guard up at all times. The mission was set for April 6. Mike Harari and Zvi Zamir arrived in Paris that afternoon, heading straight to their command room in a Mossad safe house. All the preparations had been made; all remaining decisions were in the hands of the two assassins and the one field commander closing in on Al-Kubaisi.

  At sunset, the surveillance crew reported that the subject had finished eating at the upscale Café de la Paix. He left the restaurant, bought a newspaper, and began walking toward his hotel, down one of the side streets next to the Madeleine Church. Al-Kubaisi made a detour, spending close to an hour with a local prostitute. When he emerged, two assassins approached him, rapidly closing the gap between them. Al-Kubaisi had time to yell, in French, “Non, ne faites pas cela! No, don’t do this!” before they opened fire, shooting him nine times from close range with their silenced Beretta 0.22 pistols. Al-Kubaisi collapsed in front of the corner pharmacy, dying alone on Paris’s Rue Chauveau Lagarde.

  George Habash’s PFLP published a death announcement for Dr. Basil Al-Kubaisi, declaring him a shahid, his murder a Zionist crime committed by Israeli intelligence. The announcement also blamed French authorities for their complicity in allowing the Zionists to operate unhindered on French soil. “This type of behavior on the part of the French authorities forces us to see the French government as collaborators with extremists, who operate against the interests of the Palestinian nation,” it proclaimed. A search of Al-Kubaisi’s hotel room turned up nine different passports and $1,000 in foreign currency. Harari’s three assassination teams had now knocked off four Palestinians—second-and third-tier Fatah members, suspected saya’ans of Black September and the PFLP.

  Mike Harari’s safe in Caesarea’s Tel Aviv headquarters contained a list with at least a dozen names on it. All were terrorists suspected of involvement in the Munich Massacre or other devastating attacks and included Palestinian leaders such as: Abu-Iyad, Fatah’s second in command; Abu-Daoud, the architect of the Munich Massacre; Fakhri Al-Omri and Atef Bseiso, Abu-Iyad’s operations officers; and, last but not least, Ali Hassan Salameh, a senior commander of Fatah.

  Seven months after the Munich Massacre the priorities of Israel’s intelligence agencies were firmly fixed. Their primary task was to warn of imminent attacks against Israeli targets in Europe and Israel. Their secondary priority was to supply field teams with the operational intelligence needed to plan and execute assassination missions. The intelligence poured in, but information pertaining to the men on the hit list remained weak and unreliable. Branch 4 and the Mossad’s Facha division were still groping in the dark, but a massive effort to draft a HUMINT source within Black September was under way. It was clear to all that just one source could turn the tide.

  The blacklisted men knew they were being hunted by Israel. Prime Minister Meir had declared as much from the Knesset’s podium. Abu-Iyad and his comrades and Ali Hassan Salameh had to be protected, careful, alert, and armed to the teeth if they were to survive. Most of them feared leaving Beirut, where they felt relatively safe.

  26 OPERATION SPRING OF YOUTH

  BEIRUT, SANDS BEACH MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1973, 0030H

  Major Amnon Biran, Sayeret Matkal’s chief intelligence officer, put on an overcoat and climbed to the deck of the Israeli missile boat Ga’ash. The cold, wind-drive
n salt spray stung his face as he stared across the water at the twinkling lights of Beirut two miles away. Sixteen commandos were on the ground, operating deep in enemy territory. Neither he nor any of the senior officers on board had heard a word from them in over fifteen minutes. They had slipped off sleek rubber boats on a Lebanese beach, radioed in their first codeword, and then gone silent.

  The Sayeret Matkal commandos planned to assassinate three top-level Fatah officers in their bedrooms, in the heart of Beirut. It was Israel’s most audacious counterterrorism mission to date. The intended message: “Our reach is long. We can find you anywhere.” The motive: deterrence, prevention, revenge.

  The view from the ship’s deck was grim. Major Biran paced the confined space, alternating his gaze between the waves and the bright lights of the city. Months of poring over maps and aerial photographs had helped him pinpoint a certain cluster of lights in the northwest corner of the city—in a few minutes the force should be there. But the silence irked him. They should have radioed in several codewords by now, signaling their advance through the city. Suddenly a trail of tracers cut through the night. He took a deep breath of concern: at least the teams had reached the right area. But why the tracer fire? Were they engaged in a firefight with the Lebanese army? His discomfort intensified.

  The three targeted men were Muhammad Yussef Najar, forty-four, one of the founders and the current second in command of Fatah, known as Abu-Yussef, and a lawyer by training; Kamal Adwan, thirty-eight, a petroleum engineer and commander of the relatively new Western Wing, the Fatah division charged with attacks on Israeli soil; and Kamal Nasser, forty-eight, a Palestinian Christian who served as the PLO’s chief spokesman. A talented poet, he was both charismatic and popular. The three lived next to one another, in two tall buildings in northwest Beirut, in the a-Sir neighborhood.