Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ else entirely. If the West believed the creation of a Jewish state somehow assuaged European guilt, the Palestinians demanded the world know that the birth of Israel was their collective Catastrophe by mounting an attack during a sporting festival that in ancient times prompted warring city-states to observe a temporary truce.

      In mid-July 1972 Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud—the core leadership of Black September—rendezvoused at a café in Rome. The International Olympics Committee had just announced its rejection of a Palestinian petition to send a Palestinian team to compete in the Games. Abu Iyad was incensed because, he wrote later, it seemed to confirm the international community's belief that Palestinians “didn't deserve to exist.”²³ Two days after their meeting in the Italian capital, Abu Daoud flew to Munich to see the Olympic Village for himself.²⁴ Operation Iqrit and Biri'm—an allusion to Palestinian villages outside Jerusalem cleansed by the Israelis in 1948—was in motion.²⁵

      The Games of the XX Olympiad—the Games of Peace and Joy—were set to begin on 26 August. As the world's finest athletes were preparing for competition around the globe, a contingent of Palestinians was training for hand-to-hand combat in a Libyan camp for a mission to infiltrate the Olympic Village and take Israeli Olympians hostage. Yasser Arafat certainly knew of the operation, but he prudently left the operational details to Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, who selected two men—known to the world only as Issa and Tony—to lead the assault. On 7 August, Abu Daoud returned to Munich with Tony to reconnoiter the Olympic Village for a second time. On 24 August Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud rendezvoused again in Frankfurt. Iyad and a female companion flew in from Paris carrying weapons for the assault—Kalashnikovs and grenades—in their luggage. A West German customs official inspected one bag but found only women's lingerie and waved the couple through. Over the next few days, Abu Daoud transported the weapons from Frankfurt to Munich by train and concealed them in lockers in the terminal building.

      The failure of West German—and U. S. and European—intelligence agencies was catastrophic. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, senior members of Fatah and Black September, managed to move around European capitals without detection. Now they were in West Germany, a country that had already had brushes with Palestinian terror. PFLP terrorists attacked Israelis on West German soil in Munich in February 1970, hurling grenades at the El Al ticket counter. Black September sabotaged a West German electrical plant in February 1971, and later that month the PFLP hijacked a Lufthansa flight to Yemen. After the Lufthansa incident, West German authorities complained about the Yemeni leniency because some of the terrorists were known to the West Germans. Yet inexplicably, West German authorities, who should also have known about Abu Iyad, failed to detect him at the airport with weapons of war. And the West Germans had their own indigenous terrorism. The German Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells, which were already planting bombs in West German cities by the time RAF leader Andreas Baader made contact with the PFLP in February 1972, only seven months before the West Germans would welcome the world to a restored West Germany. In fact, the West Germans had Baader in custody when the games began and after the Palestinians seized the Israeli athletes they included the release of Baader among their demands. Despite all this, the authorities were unaware of the presence of armed guerrillas in Munich until Black September violently seized the Israeli Olympians and captured the world's attention. West German and Olympic officials may have believed that the sanctity of the Olympic spirit would ward off evil, but that very attitude gave the Palestinians an advantage.

      Abu Daoud visited the Olympic Village with a young woman on the day of the opening ceremonies. Posing as Brazilians, the Palestinians talked their way past security and entered the village. As Abu Daoud tells the story, a female member of the Israeli delegation unwittingly invited them into the foyer of the Israeli athletes' apartment complex at 31 Connollystrasse. “She had no way of knowing she had considerably facilitated our task,” Abu Daoud wrote almost three decades later.²⁶ The operational commander of Operation Iqrit and Biri'm now had detailed knowledge of the layout of the apartments he would order his men to storm.

      Eleven days later, Black September transformed the Games of Peace and Joy into a spectacle of terror and death. Just after 4 A.M. on 5 September, the eve of the second anniversary of Skyjack Sunday, eight Palestinians converged outside the Olympic Village near the Israelis' apartments on 31 Connollystrasse. Their running suits and athletic bags completed the disguise of athletes returning from local pubs after curfew. Other athletes saw them but suspected nothing. No security guards patrolled the parameter. Only a low wall stood between the Palestinian terrorists and the Jewish athletes asleep in separate apartments. Thirty minutes later, after a swift assault on two apartments, two Israelis were dead and nine others taken hostage. It was their last day of life.

      The Palestinians encountered resistance trying to enter one apartment, but forced their way in past an Israeli who threw himself against the door. They shot and wounded another Israeli, Moshe Weinberg, who struggled for a terrorist's weapon. The bullet tore through his jaw, causing a horrible wound, but did not knock him unconscious. One Israeli escaped through a window when he was awakened by the sounds of struggle outside his bedroom. Within minutes the Palestinians held six Israelis and moved on to a second apartment, forcing Weinberg, who was bleeding profusely, to come with them. The Palestinians seized the six Israelis sleeping in the second apartment without resistance. But as they forced the athletes at gunpoint back to the first apartment, one Israeli broke free and ran down a flight of stairs, into a parking garage beneath the apartments and to safety. In the same instant, Moshe Weinberg lunged at the Palestinians again. The act probably saved his compatriot's life, but it cost him his own, as a terrorist shot him to death in the act. When the Palestinians gathered the second group of hostages together with the first in an upper bedroom, another Israeli, Yossef Romano, made a desperate grab for one of the terrorist's weapons. The Palestinian killed him instantly with a burst from his Kalashnikov. The assault ended with Romano's death. There, in a bedroom before dawn, nine Israelis were bound and forced to sit in a circle around Romano's corpse on the floor in a pool of blood as a warning to the Israelis about the punishment for resistance.

      By 5 A.M. the Israelis who escaped alerted officials in the Olympic Village to the assault. Word spread throughout West German officialdom and the media. As police arrived at the scene, Issa, the commander of the operation, appeared outside the apartment to communicate demands for the release of hundreds of fedayeen from Israeli prisons and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff, the leaders of the Red Army Faction, whom West German authorities had finally arrested in June. Issa set a 9 A.M. deadline for compliance with the demands; after that Palestinians would begin executing the Israelis one by one. To prove their seriousness, the Palestinians threw Weinberg's body into the street in front of the apartment where they held the other Olympians.

      The West German government conveyed Black September's demands to Golda Meir, the indomitable Israeli prime minister, who immediately rejected them in principle. Meir refused even to contemplate negotiations. Instead, Meir immediately dispatched the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, to Munich as she pleaded with the West German authorities to permit an elite Sayaret Matkal counterterrorist unit to assist in a rescue. The Israeli special forces had proven their abilities just last May, when they took down the Sabena hijackers. Meir put them on alert to leave for West Germany at a moment's notice. The call to action never came.

      West Germany's highest officials rushed to Munich before day's end. Chancellor Willy Brandt arrived in the afternoon. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister and future foreign minister, arrived at the same time and met face-to-face with Issa. Genscher even offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the release of the Israelis. Then the West Germans offered an undisclosed sum of money and safe passage for the Palestinians in exchange for the lives of the Jewish athletes and the swift termination of an embarrassing incident. A cash offer worked in February when the PFLP seized a Lufthansa flight and diverted it to Aden. It was the PFLP that seized the Lufthansa flight, but Black September was not content with a massive infusion of cash into its war chest. Israel's adamant refusal to capitulate to the terrorists' demands—or to make a good will gesture like those offered during the El Al crisis in Algeria in 1968—left the West Germans with few options. The most promising possibility was to СКАЧАТЬ