T3 – Munich Myths & Truths
The Myths and Reality of Munich
After the slaughter of its Olympians, Israel vowed to hunt down the killers. But, says a new book, that’s not whom it got
By LISA BEYER
Posted Sunday, Dec. 04, 2005
Golda Meir didn’t want to believe the news. The Israeli Prime Minister had heard media reports that West German police had rescued the Israeli Olympic athletes taken hostage by terrorists in Munich. Now Zvi Zamir, head of the Mossad, was phoning from Germany at 3 a.m. to correct that account. “I saw it with my own eyes,” he told her. “No one was left alive.”
That was the end of a debacle that had begun 23 hours earlier, when Palestinian terrorists from the Black September organization burst into the dorm housing the Israeli delegation at the 1972 Olympics and took 11 of its members hostage. It was also the start of a much longer, more complicated chapter in the saga: Israel’s methodical extraction of revenge. About the events in Munich on Sept. 5, 1972, there is considerable clarity. The story of the reprisal missions, on the other hand, has been befogged by mystery. The notion persists that the Israelis drew up a list of those responsible for Munich, then, one by one, knocked them off. But that’s largely a myth, according to an upcoming book by TIME reporter Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response (Random House; 272 pages). The Israelis, Klein writes, had to settle for smaller targets, killing activists who for the most part had nothing to do with the Munich massacre and leaving alive, to this day, some who were involved.
The Munich spectacular was designed to be just that. Black September was an unacknowledged offshoot of Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (P.L.O.). Abu Iyad, the Arafat deputy who headed Black September, later explained that the hostage taking was meant “to use the unprecedented number of media outlets in one city to display the Palestinian struggle–for better or worse!”
Security was lax at the Olympic Village. Wearing sweat suits, eight men simply climbed over a 6-ft. barrier around the village at 4:10 a.m. Armed with AK-47s, they rounded up 11 Israeli athletes, coaches and a referee, shooting two dead early on. The terrorists demanded the release of 234 prisoners from Israeli jails. Negotiations were ruled out by the Israelis, but the Germans began fake ones to buy time. In the afternoon, the Black September commander, distinctive in his white hat, insisted that his team and the hostages be flown to Cairo.
The Germans choppered them to F
Eye for an Eye.
I think we’re going to see a lot more of articles like this. Picking apart this story. Piece by piece.
There will never be a definitive accounting of what exactly went on.
I think we’ll see. A lot of sentences in this comments section. Broken up into segments.
Not a slam, I just keep noticing this posting quirk in several of the commenters here.
This could be like the controversy over A Beautiful Mind. That festered–best word I can think of–almost the whole Oscar season. It didn’t affect that movie’s fortunes ultimately, but it made things unpleasant the whole time. I’m not looking forward to a repeat. It’ll give Drudge something to trumpet when there’s no political shenanigans going on, that’s for sure.
“And Munich’s actual perpetrators? Klein believes the Mossad got only one man directly connected to the massacre: Atef Bseiso, shot in Paris as late as 1992.”
None of the accounts I’ve read have ever reported anything close to that. I guess this new book will claim that (to name just one guy) Ali Hassan Salameh, “The Red Prince,” had nothing to do with Munich, although that would certainly be news to me. He was killed by Israeli agents in Lebanon in 1979. One assassination attempt against him was tragically bungled several years earlier, where they ended up killing someone innocent (whom they had mistaken for The Red Prince). I assume that something relating to that incident will be in Spielberg’s movie.
“The Israelis, of course, wanted to get to the real planners and executors of Munich, but these had hunkered down with bodyguards in East-bloc and Arab countries, where the Israelis couldn’t reach them.”
Tough to get to people behind the Iron Curtain, true enough, but “Arab countries” includes Lebanon, which is where the PLO had been headquartered ever since the “Black September” battle with the Jordanian government led to the PLO’s expulsion from Jordan in Sept. of 1970 (hence the name of the group). Several different Israeli hit squads managed to assassinate various terrorists in Lebanon during the ’70s. Again, I suppose Klein has some reporting to claim that none of the PLO guys killed by Israeli hit squads in Lebanon had anything to do with Munich, but I’ll be pretty skeptical of that until I see any compelling reasons to think otherwise.