Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response by Aaron J. Klein Page B
Authors: Aaron J. Klein
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massacre.
An El Al Boeing 707 carrying ten coffins was due to land at Lod Airport at 1145 hours . Israel had withdrawn from the Games and the surviving Israeli athletes and delegation members were on board as well, accompanying their slain colleagues. Funerals would take place immediately following a brief military ceremony at the airport. The eleventh victim, weight lifter David Berger, had been flown from Germany earlier that day. President Richard Nixon had sent an American air force plane to bring the athlete’s body back to his hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio.
The Israeli government declared September 7 an official day of mourning. The nation was traumatized. Flags were lowered to half-mast; stores, restaurants, and government offices were closed. People clustered in the streets, reading the papers in groups, learning the anatomy of the tragedy.
The Munich attack was unlike anything the young country had weathered. It was a dividing line, separating history into “before Munich” and “after Munich.” Israel had known trying hours before, but Munich cut through all its defensive layers of scar tissue and sinew. Jews had been led yet again to their death on German soil. Images of the athletes, Israel’s finest, bound, unable to resist their impending death, tore deeply into the nation’s psyche. A feeling of helplessness prevailed. Only twenty-seven years had passed since six million Jews had been herded into camps and murdered. Now, the wounds of the Holocaust bled again.
The Mossad department responsible for gathering operational intelligence on terrorist organizations was humming with frenetic activity. An emergency draft had quadrupled their workforce overnight. New recruits, who had passed the rigorous entrance exams two months earlier but had yet to begin the case officers course, were called in to assist the department’s five permanent staffers.
The Mossad staff officers crammed into three small rooms. Their task was to review every personnel file, to reread every piece of data, to find threads and expose connections that would lead them to the identities of the planners and perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. They needed to understand and unmask Black September, and identify its links to Fatah and the PLO.
Over the ensuing weeks and months they would sift through tens of thousands of raw intelligence reports. Mossad personnel stayed up late and worked weekends. Emotions ran high; commitment was total: everyone knew the significance of the quest.
Failure, frustration, and shock were written across Zvi Zamir’s face that morning as he made his way to his tenth-floor office. Three floors below, at the Tzomet (Crossroads) wing of the Mossad, the feeling was equally dour. Tzomet case officers (
katsa
s), operating from Europe, drafted and ran Arab agents that were either part of, or subsequently inserted into, the military, political, and economic spheres of all Arab countries. This human intelligence—HUMINT—was, in the 1970s, Israel’s primary means of discovering the intentions and capabilities of its enemies. But the focus had been on Syria and Egypt—Israel’s neighbors to the north and south—where the threat of war loomed. Terrorist organizations were a bit neglected.
Nonetheless, for the past forty-eight hours Tzomet staff officers had been grappling with a frustrating and demanding question: How did we not sound the bell? How did we not learn of the plan? How did we so utterly fail to pick up a single bit of intelligence about this attack, which must have required a considerable time to plan, and certainly included a few dozen people? One day earlier, just twenty-four hours after the hostage situation came to its tragic end, Zamir had commissioned an internal investigative team to examine the Mossad intelligence failure. It was already clear that no one in the Israeli intelligence community had so much as one quality HUMINT source in Black
An El Al Boeing 707 carrying ten coffins was due to land at Lod Airport at 1145 hours . Israel had withdrawn from the Games and the surviving Israeli athletes and delegation members were on board as well, accompanying their slain colleagues. Funerals would take place immediately following a brief military ceremony at the airport. The eleventh victim, weight lifter David Berger, had been flown from Germany earlier that day. President Richard Nixon had sent an American air force plane to bring the athlete’s body back to his hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio.
The Israeli government declared September 7 an official day of mourning. The nation was traumatized. Flags were lowered to half-mast; stores, restaurants, and government offices were closed. People clustered in the streets, reading the papers in groups, learning the anatomy of the tragedy.
The Munich attack was unlike anything the young country had weathered. It was a dividing line, separating history into “before Munich” and “after Munich.” Israel had known trying hours before, but Munich cut through all its defensive layers of scar tissue and sinew. Jews had been led yet again to their death on German soil. Images of the athletes, Israel’s finest, bound, unable to resist their impending death, tore deeply into the nation’s psyche. A feeling of helplessness prevailed. Only twenty-seven years had passed since six million Jews had been herded into camps and murdered. Now, the wounds of the Holocaust bled again.
The Mossad department responsible for gathering operational intelligence on terrorist organizations was humming with frenetic activity. An emergency draft had quadrupled their workforce overnight. New recruits, who had passed the rigorous entrance exams two months earlier but had yet to begin the case officers course, were called in to assist the department’s five permanent staffers.
The Mossad staff officers crammed into three small rooms. Their task was to review every personnel file, to reread every piece of data, to find threads and expose connections that would lead them to the identities of the planners and perpetrators of the Munich Massacre. They needed to understand and unmask Black September, and identify its links to Fatah and the PLO.
Over the ensuing weeks and months they would sift through tens of thousands of raw intelligence reports. Mossad personnel stayed up late and worked weekends. Emotions ran high; commitment was total: everyone knew the significance of the quest.
Failure, frustration, and shock were written across Zvi Zamir’s face that morning as he made his way to his tenth-floor office. Three floors below, at the Tzomet (Crossroads) wing of the Mossad, the feeling was equally dour. Tzomet case officers (
katsa
s), operating from Europe, drafted and ran Arab agents that were either part of, or subsequently inserted into, the military, political, and economic spheres of all Arab countries. This human intelligence—HUMINT—was, in the 1970s, Israel’s primary means of discovering the intentions and capabilities of its enemies. But the focus had been on Syria and Egypt—Israel’s neighbors to the north and south—where the threat of war loomed. Terrorist organizations were a bit neglected.
Nonetheless, for the past forty-eight hours Tzomet staff officers had been grappling with a frustrating and demanding question: How did we not sound the bell? How did we not learn of the plan? How did we so utterly fail to pick up a single bit of intelligence about this attack, which must have required a considerable time to plan, and certainly included a few dozen people? One day earlier, just twenty-four hours after the hostage situation came to its tragic end, Zamir had commissioned an internal investigative team to examine the Mossad intelligence failure. It was already clear that no one in the Israeli intelligence community had so much as one quality HUMINT source in Black
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