Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (4 page)

5
                  
THE MISSION UNFOLDS

GERMANY, COLOGNE AIRPORT WEDNESDAY,
AUGUST 23, 1972

A middle-aged couple waited for their four pieces of luggage to arrive. The man, dressed in a well-tailored suit, hoisted the bags onto two carts. They joined the flow of people walking toward the customs line and the exit beyond.

The Palestinian man worked as a
saya’an
(a Hebrew security term meaning “helper”—an uninformed, ideologically motivated accomplice) for Fatah and its Black September wing in Europe. The “wife,” another
saya’an,
joined him to lend legitimacy to their cover. The Fatah planners knew that an Arab man, traveling alone, to a city hosting the Olympics, with four bulging suitcases in tow, might raise the suspicions of even the most soporific customs official, putting the entire mission at risk.

The couple had almost made it through customs when an officer beckoned them aside. The couple pressed together and nervously made their way to the inspection platform. They presented North African passports and were asked to open their identical bags. The husband refused. He began to yell and scream. He was a businessman, not a criminal. He had never been so thoroughly embarrassed in all his travels throughout Europe. Why should he be treated this way? The bored customs officers looked on, eyes half-closed. They had seen this act before, and they knew how it ended—the traveler opened his bags for inspection, end of story. Those who yelled the loudest were often the guiltiest. They had seen plenty of drugs and gold cross their path.

After yelling for several minutes, the Palestinian lowered his voice and asked the customs officer which bag he should open. The officer picked one. After wiping the sweat from his brow and fiddling for his keys, the man opened the suitcase. The release of the locks popped the lid. Lingerie, in many colors and styles, swamped the inspection desk. The officer motioned to the man: close your case and carry on. He didn’t ask the couple to open their other three pieces of luggage. Eight AK
-47
s, dozens of magazines loaded with
7.62
mm bullets, and ten grenades slid by undetected on the wobbly wheels of a trolley.

The couple left the terminal, rented a roomy car, and drove the 280 miles to Munich. They had no idea what they were transporting or why. They were couriers. Now and again they were told to carry suitcases, letters, and packages. They never asked questions, and had never been caught.

On arriving in Munich, they followed their instructions to the letter. The couple placed their suitcases in four different lockers in the Munich central railway station and handed the keys over to the concierge of a small, nearby hotel. Hours later, a Black September commander came by the front desk and picked up his package.

The senior members of Fatah, working under the name Black September, sighed in collective relief when they learned that the baggage had safely arrived. The operation was on track, progressing exactly as planned. They had thirteen more days. They’d act on the tenth day of the Olympics, in the early morning hours of Tuesday, September
5, 1972.

Black September was unveiled in the fall of 1971. It was born on the heels of a massacre. In mid-September 1970, King Hussein, the ruler of Jordan, had his back against the wall. Palestinians, who by that time represented nearly 60 percent of the Jordanian population, were on the brink of toppling his regime. Bloody battles erupted in the streets of the capital, Amman. Thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hussein’s army. The surviving activists, overpowered, fled for their lives. Thousands entered Syria and from there continued on to the neighborhoods surrounding the Lebanese capital of Beirut. Once there, they began to rebuild their terrorist infrastructure.

Black September’s primary mission was to avenge the killings committed by Hussein’s Hashemite regime. Its first undertaking was the assassination of Wasfi Al-Tell, the Jordanian prime minister—a man they saw as a sworn enemy of the Palestinians. Al-Tell was gunned down in the Cairo Sheraton on November
27, 1971.
One of his killers bent down and, to the astonishment of eyewitnesses, lapped up Al-Tell’s blood.

The murder of the prime minister was the first of a slew of revenge killings. Black September operatives, acting in Europe, detonated bombs in the Jordanian embassy in Geneva, lobbed Molotov cocktails at the embassy in Paris, and fired a machine gun at the ambassador to England.

Black September was different from other Palestinian terror organizations: it had no offices, no addresses, no official leaders, and no spokespersons. Fatah members embraced the secrecy surrounding Black September, feeding its aura of mystery, its martial might and propaganda potential. But Black September was not as autonomous as it seemed—Salah Khalaf, widely known as Abu-Iyad, deputy of Arafat and one of the commanders of the Fatah, was Black September’s unofficial leader.

Black September’s goals were far more than simply revenge. Arafat and other Fatah leaders wanted to demonstrate their power and display—in no uncertain terms—their international prominence after their defeat at the hands of the Jordanians. Fatah leaders also made a strategic decision to become involved in international terrorism, particularly in Europe, where left-wing factions of the Palestinian resistance were hijacking planes and pulling off many different high-profile terrorist stunts, their popularity growing across the Middle East and indeed around the world as a result.

Abu-Iyad never acknowledged his leadership of Black September; he, like Arafat, disavowed any connection to the group. Arafat, when asked about his relationship to Black September at the time, offered this: “We don’t know anything about this organization nor are we involved in any of its activities, but we do understand the mentality of young people who are willing to die for the life of Palestine.” The technical arrangement whereby Fatah would quietly take the credit for, and publicly disavow any connection to, terror attacks, suited Arafat: it allowed him to build a facade of respectability as head of an organization with clean hands and legitimate, nationalistic aspirations—while approving sensationalistic attacks behind the scenes.

Black September disseminated information on a need-to-know basis. Beyond Abu-Iyad, few were allowed to see the complete picture. Its structure consisted of two inner circles. The first was comprised of Abu-Iyad’s disciples. Mohammed Oudeh, an operations officer known as Abu-Daoud, was the most senior. He was the architect of the Munich operation. Fakhri Al-Omri, the operations officer and a rising star in Fatah, served as Abu-Iyad’s confidant and right-hand man. Al-Omri was cunning, calm under duress, a gifted tactician, and a skilled organizer. It was he who picked up the keys and collected the weapons from the lockers in Munich, and he followed the operation through all its stages. The other men in this innermost circle were Amin Al-Hindi, who later ran an intelligence wing in the Palestinian Authority, and Atef Bseiso, later Fatah’s liaison with European intelligence organizations.

A second circle consisted of accomplices who, like the couple that smuggled in the four suitcases, knew nothing beyond their personal assignments. They handled forged passports, rented cars and apartments, bought plane tickets, and concealed documents. Many were Palestinians living in Europe. Some were university students, others were part of the Palestinian Diaspora who had settled comfortably in Europe, perhaps married locally, while remaining ardent in their desire to help liberate their stolen homeland from the Zionist oppressor. Close to one hundred people of this sort were in Black September’s employ.

The Mossad was caught off guard by the scope of Black September’s ambition. Up until May 1972 all the group’s operations were aimed at Jordanian targets. The Mossad frequently reported to Prime Minister Meir’s cabinet that Black September was interested only in harming the kingdom next door. That argument collapsed on May
8, 1972,
when Black September took credit for hijacking Sabena Flight 571. Not only was there no warning of the attack, but the Mossad and Military Intelligence utterly failed to recognize what was clearly a strategic shift: a newfound focus on Israeli targets. Even after Sabena, Israeli intelligence agencies continued to insist that Israel was not the main target; the Sabena highjacking was just a ricochet, the price of proximity to Jordan.

Why did Abu-Iyad choose the Munich Games as the target for a major terror attack? In his book,
Stateless,
Abu-Iyad later wrote that the operation sought to achieve three goals. One was “to present the existence of the Palestinian People to the whole world, whether they like it or not.” Another was “to secure the release of 200 Palestinian fighters locked in Israeli jails.”

And the third, in a neat encapsulation of the rationale of all terrorists, was this: “to use the unprecedented number of media outlets in one city to display the Palestinian struggle—for better or worse!”

6
                  
SEIZING THE ATHLETES

MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1972, 0015H

The bus was filled with the sounds of backslapping and laughter. The jubilant Israeli athletes were on their way back to the Olympic Village after an evening at the theater. The delegation had just seen
Fiddler on the Roof,
in German, with Shmuel Rodensky, the noted Israeli stage actor, in the lead role. He invited the team backstage during the intermission to meet the cast. They took a group picture: their last.

Shmuel Lalkin, head of the delegation, sat at the front of the bus, his wife, Yardena, by his side. Arik, his thirteen-year-old son, was hanging out in the back row with the wrestlers and weight lifters. Yossef Romano, David Berger, Mark Slavin, and Eliezer Halfin were crazy about the kid.

As the bus approached the Olympic Village, Arik sidled up to his father and asked to sleep in the wrestlers’ room. Lalkin refused. His family was not part of the delegation, which meant they slept outside of the village, at their own expense. Arik cried and begged. “Dad, c’mon, I’m a big kid already. They’re my friends. Just one night.” Lalkin did not cave in. He needed to set a personal example for everyone else on the squad. Romano and Halfin came to help Arik out. “We’ll look out for him, Shmuel, don’t worry, it’s only one night. Look how badly he wants to come and, anyway, it’ll just keep us loose.” Lalkin wouldn’t budge. Even a stern look from Yardena didn’t change his mind. Principles were immovable, always. Romano, Israel’s champion weight lifter in the middleweight class for the last ten years, kept the pressure on for a few more seconds and then returned with Halfin to his seat. At 0030 hours the athletes filed off the bus at the Olympic Village. Yardena and Arik continued on to their apartment, ten minutes away. The pleasant Munich weather brought a few of the Israeli athletes to the dining room for a late night snack. Eventually everybody said good night and went to their quarters.

The delegation had been assigned five apartments. Apartment 1 was for the coaches and judges; Apartment 2, the marksmen, the fencers, and the track and field athletes; Apartment 3, the weight lifters and wrestlers; Apartment 4, the doctor; Apartment 5, Shmuel Lalkin. The women stayed in separate dorms far from the men’s quarters. Israel’s two sailors were housed in northern Germany, in Kiel, where their competition was being held.

It was almost one in the morning when Lalkin finally went to his room. He set his alarm for
6 A.M.
He wanted to support Mark Slavin, the rookie wrestler, by attending his pre-match weigh-in.

While the members of the Israeli delegation were enjoying
Fiddler on the Roof,
eight Palestinian terrorists, traveling solo and in pairs, arrived at the Munich central railway station, just a ten-minute walk from the theater, and ordered dinner. They were excited. Nobody could sit still. Whispers were exchanged. This was their first face-to-face meeting. Seated around a rectangular table, they learned the particulars of the mission. One of the commanders leaned in from the head of the table and, speaking in a hushed tone, explained that they were going to kidnap the Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village, take them hostage, and release them in exchange for over two hundred Palestinian prisoners held behind bars in Israel. The hostages and the kidnappers would fly to an Arab state, where the exchange would be made. The operation, called Ikrit and Biram, was named in memory of two Christian villages near the Israeli border with Lebanon. The villagers were forcibly evacuated by the Israelis in 1951 “until the security situation allows their return.” Abu-Iyad chose the code name as a symbol of the Palestinian desire to return to a homeland that had been torn away from under their feet.

Jamal Al-Jishey, a dark-skinned nineteen-year-old, was brimming with motivation. Years later, as one of the three Palestinians to live through Munich, he would say (as captured in the documentary film
One Day in September
), “I felt great pride and happiness that I would be participating in an operation against the Israelis. I was finally going to fulfill my dream.” Just a few months before, as the heat of the summer started to rise, Al-Jishey was summoned to an elite training camp established by Fatah leaders on the Mediterranean shore, a few miles south of Beirut. The Al-Jisheys lived in Shatila, the teeming Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. Fifty men, the youngest of them only seventeen, arrived with Al-Jishey for basic training. All the recruits learned how to fire an AK
-47
assault rifle and properly release F
-1
hand grenades. At the end of the training session, six out of the fifty were selected. They lived in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and were ready to give their lives if necessary.

The group’s members were: Adnan Al-Jishey, twenty-six, uncle of Jamal Al-Jishey, married, and a gifted student who held a chemistry scholarship to the American University of Beirut; Mohammed Safady, nineteen, garrulous and confident; Khalid Jawad, a strong soccer player who had lived in West Germany for two years; Ahmed Sheik Thaa, who grew up in Germany; and Afif Ahmed Hamid, a veteran member of the Fatah organization who had recently returned to Beirut after studying for a little more than a year at a German university.

The six were told that they had been selected for a top secret mission. The details of the operation remained a mystery. They were instructed to leave their families without telling them anything about what they were doing. In mid-July, the month before the Olympics, the group of six flew to Libya for advanced military training. In the isolation of the desert camp the six young men became one cohesive group. “We got to know each other during training in Libya; we were all alike, children of the Palestinian refugee camps with a shared cause and a shared aim,” Jamal Al-Jishey said. Al-Jishey and his partners endured endless hours of intensive training drills at a tent camp deep in the heart of the Libyan desert. In the dead heat of July, an exhaustive exercise routine beat them into shape. Their daily regimen included endless sprints and leaps, especially over walls and fences. Al-Jishey was sure he was going to be sent into a Zionist army base. He never imagined that the drills were preparing him for quick entry into the Olympic Village in Munich, Germany.

Muhammad Massalha, twenty-seven, was appointed commander of the operation. He spoke fluent German. As a teen, he had lived in West Germany for several years. He chose the nickname Issa, Arabic for Jesus. His second in command, Tony (Yussef Nazzal), used the nom de guerre Che Guevara, in tribute to the South American revolutionary. Abu-Iyad referred to Tony as the military mind behind Ikrit and Biram. He was a well-educated twenty-five-year-old who spoke German well. Both men were brought into the limited circle of knowledge. In early summer, Issa and Tony visited Munich. They watched the village being built, learning its layout and its points of vulnerability. Palestinian accomplices, many of them students at German universities, helped Issa and Tony collect information. They did not ask the goal of the mission. Their mantra was blind, unflinching assistance.

With the weapons safely stored in the train station lockers, the leaders of the operation, Abu-Iyad, Abu-Daoud, and Fakhri Al-Omri, had to see to the safe arrival of the six terrorists. It was their duty to ensure that the foot soldiers, without whom the meticulously planned operation would have to be aborted, would fly out of Tripoli and arrive in Munich without arousing suspicion. There was the constant threat of discovery; one alert customs official could bring the whole mission to a halt. That did not happen.

On August 31, five days into the Olympic Games, Jamal Al-Jishey, his uncle Adnan, and Mohammed Safady landed in Munich. The three flew from Tripoli, and stopped briefly in Rome before landing in Munich. The other three foot soldiers arrived in Munich via Belgrade. They each held a Jordanian passport, forged in Beirut and delivered to Tripoli. Each passport had a fake West German entry visa. The work was so amateurish that in one of the passports the visa was attached upside down, crossed out with a black X, and replaced by an additional visa, placed right side up, on the next page. The two groups were met by Issa and Tony and taken to several small hotels and hostels located in the city center, next to the train station. During the following four days, the eight Palestinians acted like normal tourists, sightseeing, eating out, and catching up on sleep. Jamal Al-Jishey even went to two Olympic volleyball games.

On September 4, shortly before midnight, the group of eight met at the central railway station restaurant, where they learned what their mission entailed. After settling the bill, the group walked over to the nearby lockers to collect the weapons that had been waiting for them all week. They returned to their separate hotels and changed into red training suits, which would help them blend in with the athletes in the Olympic Village. They rode in two cabs. Jamal Al-Jishey, the only one to speak publicly about that night, said, “I was young, full of enthusiasm and drive, and the idea of Palestine and returning there was all that controlled my thinking and my being. We knew that achieving our objective would cost lives, but since the day we joined up, we had been aware that there was a possibility of martyrdom at any time in the name of Palestine. We were not afraid, but we felt the apprehension that a person feels when embarking on an important mission, the fear of failure.”

At 0410 hours
,
two groups of four operatives each reached the village’s perimeter fence, near Gate 25A. They aroused no suspicion. Like many of the athletes returning from a night on the town, they wore Olympic sweat suits and were ostensibly sneaking back to their rooms. One of the two terrorist bands met a group of American athletes near the fence. The tipsy Americans and the wired Palestinians helped each other over the simple, six-foot barrier. Once inside the village the two groups walked together for a while before parting and bidding each other good night. The terrorists carried Olympic duffel bags, their weapons hidden under clothing. They encountered no guards as they made their way through the village, although six German postal workers had noticed the Palestinians as they jumped over the fence. To their sober eyes the men seemed suspicious. They reported the break-in, but no action was taken. Walking quickly, Issa led his men straight to 31 Connollystrasse. Arriving at the building, each one pulled an AK
-47
out of his gym bag, snapped a thirty-bullet magazine into place, and slipped a round into the chamber.