Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco

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СКАЧАТЬ to mediate. In fact, the terrorists' contingency plan involved departure to an Arab state with the hostages. But Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would not assume responsibility for their lives. With Israel refusing to negotiate and Egypt refusing to mediate, the West Germans could only attempt to delay and deceive the eight terrorists barricaded inside 31 Connollystrasse with the nine Olympians.

      The West Germans managed to push back the 9 A.M. deadline for the beginning of the executions until noon, then one o'clock, then three, then five, then seven. By early afternoon they were reluctantly planning a rescue operation. The first attempt at an armed rescue came after the deadline was pushed back to seven. By then officials, including Genscher, had entered the Israeli apartment and seen the terror in the eyes of the Jewish athletes for themselves. “I will never forget those faces,” Genscher would say later.²⁷ Rescue must have seemed the last best option. But there was no elite counterterrorism unit up to the task. The best the Munich police could muster were a dozen or so police for an assault, police whose courage surpassed their training. Fortunately for them, their superiors never gave the order to attack. Issa, who saw live television images of the police assembling on the roof above them, forced the West Germans to pull back with the threat of the immediate execution of hostages. The journalistic impulse to broadcast breaking news compromised the mission and, although the indiscretion could have cost lives, it probably saved them for the time being. Even some of the police selected to break into the apartments through the air vents admitted the operation was suicide. But the disaster that was adverted in the Olympic Village was awaiting the Israeli athletes, and the terrorists who abducted them, on the outskirts of Munich.

      The West Germans seized on another stratagem: they would lure the Palestinians to Fürstenfeldbruck, an airport outside Munich, with the false promise that a Lufthansa 737 would fly them and the hostages to Cairo. Genscher informed Issa that a peaceful resolution of the crisis was near. Issa had only to allow the West Germans time to arrange the complicated logistics: helicopters to transport the Palestinians and the Israeli Olympians to Fürstenfeldbruck, a jet to fly them to Egypt, pilots who would risk becoming hostages or casualties. It would take another three hours for the West Germans to put everything in place. The reality was that the West Germans wanted to lure the Palestinians into a field of fire. Snipers took positions in the parking garage beneath the apartment complex. It was nearly two hundred yards from the Israeli apartment to the field where the helicopters were waiting. But Issa, who took the precaution of walking the distance with officials to observe the route for himself, demanded a bus. The West Germans were forced to move the ambush to Fürstenfeldbruck. It was after 10:00 P.M. before Issa, the seven other fedayeen, and the nine Israelis made their way from 31 Connollystrasse to the bus and through the parking garage to the helicopters for the thirty-minute flight to Fürstenfeldbruck. Twenty minutes later, the two helicopters were airborne. The Israelis were bound inside, five in one helicopter, four in the other.

      The fatal tactical errors at Fürstenfeldbruck were those of a police force that had not contemplated a terror attack in the Bavarian capital. The snipers deployed at the darkened airport were poorly armed and inadequately trained for a firefight with hardened commandos. They had only hours to organize an ambush. Those on the ground were not even in direct radio contact with each other. The police might have stood some chance of success against fatigued Palestinians if the crisis had dragged on for days, but the Palestinians, aware of the fate of the Black September hijackers of the Sabena flight in May, did not commit the failure of permitting the West Germans or the Israelis to wear them down. The West German refusal to permit Israel's Sayaret Matkal to take charge of the rescue, or even to give tactical advice, was about to have terrible consequences. And in an incredible intelligence failure, the West Germans deployed only five snipers. Authorities in the Olympic Village never conveyed an accurate count of the Palestinians to the police who were assembling to ambush them.

      The helicopters arrived just after 10:30 P.M. Most of the terrorists stepped off, exposing themselves to snipers concealed on the roof of the small control tower building directly in front of them. Issa and another terrorist walked across the tarmac to inspect the jet awaiting them with engines revving. But when they boarded it they found no crew and sensed a trap. West German police, who were to have overpowered the men, abandoned their positions only minutes before the helicopters put down. The rescue failed then and there. As the Palestinians ran back to the helicopters shouting over the roar of the engines, the West Germans opened fire. But the snipers' aim was not true. One terrorist was killed in the first volley of shots, another wounded. But the others took cover beneath the helicopters and returned fire. The nine Israelis bound together inside the helicopters were defenseless as bullets ricocheted off the tarmac. The firefight at Fürstenfeldbruck lasted more than an hour. It ended in a massacre. As the West Germans brought up armored vehicles in support of the snipers, the Palestinians acted on their orders to defend themselves. One Palestinian fired at point-blank range into one helicopter, killing four of the Jewish athletes, another threw a grenade into the second helicopter killing the other five. When it was over, nine Israelis, five Palestinians, and a West German policeman were dead.

      The carnage on the tarmac at Fürstenfeldbruck was not the end of the incident for either the Palestinians or the Israelis. Black September felt duty-bound to liberate the three imprisoned survivors of Operation Iqrit and Biri'm. It took them less than two months to force the West Germans to free them. On 29 October, Black September terrorists seized control of a Lufthansa flight out of Beirut for Munich and diverted it to Damascus. On the ground in the Syrian capital the hijackers threatened to blow up the plane and the passengers unless the German chancellor released fedayeen incarcerated in West Germany. Willy Brandt complied, and the survivors of the firefight in Munich went free.²⁸ It was the end of a bad run for West German counterterrorism. The authorities failed to intercept the terrorists who attacked the Olympics, killed the Israeli hostages trying to save them, and now submitted to demands for the release of terrorists from their jurisdiction.

      Committee X

      Judaism teaches that anyone who saves a life saves the world; it also teaches an eye for an eye. Golda Meir resolved to be true to the ancient tradition. In the aftermath of the atrocity in West Germany, Golda Meir convened a meeting of her senior national security and counterterrorism advisors. At their urging, Meir resolved to hunt down the leadership of Black September. This was the origin of the Mossad Operation Wrath of God. Even for a state at war with implacable adversaries, the decision to sanction assassination crossed an invisible line into morally ambiguous territory. Plausible deniability became critical for political as well as the obvious operational reasons. Operation Wrath of God became a closely guarded secret of an ad hoc Committee X composed of the highest authorities of the Jewish state.²⁹ Committee X sent covert teams of assassins across the Middle East and Europe to hunt down Black September terrorists. Without making the error of moral equivalence, the assassination teams were not unlike Black September. If the Palestinians adopted the name Black September to obscure the connections between its actions and the PLO leadership, the assassination teams attempted to distance themselves from the Mossad. The assassination teams led by the shadowy “Mike”—Mike Harari, who decades later became involved with Panamanian dictator Manual Noriega—and “Avner” went so far as to resign their commissions in the Mossad to create the conditions for plausible deniability in the argot of the intelligence community.

      In fact, Committee X only decided to intensify and broaden a campaign of selective assassinations the Israeli government had begun years earlier. In July, before Munich, the Mossad assassinated Ghassan Kanafani and maimed lesser-known PLO figures with letter bombs; two years before that, in July 1970, the Mossad nearly assassinated Wadi Haddad in his Beirut apartment. Assassination was nothing new. The national clamor to avenge the Israeli Olympians only provided Israel more justification for reprisal killings or preemptive strikes to smite its terrorist enemies. Not all those marked for death belonged to Black September; PFLP cadres were hunted down and killed as well. And, the assassinations Committee X sanctioned served a broader strategic purpose. Not all those killed were terrorists; some were PLO moderates, who were killed at a moment when Israel had reasons to fear Arafat's tilt toward moderation.

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