Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (11 page)

The Mossad and the intelligence community, with the backing of the public consensus and the parliament, were stretching the meaning of the term “terrorist involvement” to the limit. Anyone vaguely connected to a terrorist organization or act was immediately placed on the top of a slippery slope; assassination waited below. Senior intelligence officials believed that “a terrorist is a terrorist is a terrorist.” They felt that the times demanded that the gray area between guilt and innocence disappear. The head of the Mossad needed no encouragement from the prime minister. Everyone in the defense establishment was determined to avenge the murders at Munich.

18
                  
SHADOW WARS

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, CAFÉ PRINCE, PLACE DE BROKER SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1972, 2000H

Five days after the massacre at the Olympics, the public was given a rare glimpse at the covert and dangerous world of a Mossad case officer—a
katsa.
On the eve of the Jewish New Year, September
10, 1972,
katsa
Tzadok Ofir received a phone call at his Brussels home. He was told that a young Moroccan man with information about Black September’s operations in Europe wanted to meet him ASAP. Ofir knew his bosses at the Mossad Tzomet headquarters would want the meeting to happen immediately—despite the holiday and the history of the man requesting the get-together. Rabah, the young Moroccan exile, had offered his services to the Mossad in the past and been denied, but, days after the Olympic massacre, none of the Mossad’s
katsa
s had the luxury of filtering intelligence information: anything that came in had to be turned over and examined. Black September knew the Mossad would be hungry for information, which is why they sent Rabah—a former revolutionary and current thief—to kill Ofir.

Ofir walked into the Café Prince on Place de Broker fifteen minutes early. He looked over the old, wood-paneled Victorian establishment in downtown Brussels and found what he was looking for: a darkened table in the corner, where he could keep his back to the wall and watch patrons come and go. He was alone and unarmed. Every few minutes he got up to see if Rabah was waiting outside. His gut was issuing dull pangs of warning.

Rabah arrived at 2000 hours sharp. His first contact with the Mossad had been from the Netherlands’ Aranheim Prison, Cell 81. From there, as Prisoner 3382, a petty thief, he sent multiple letters to the Israeli embassy. Tzomet never wrote back. Rabah provided ample information about his past, but most of it made him appear untrustworthy. He either was or was not an officer in the Moroccan armed forces; he had been exiled from that country; he had affiliated himself with the Palestinian cause; and he had taken a number of combat courses with Palestinian terror organizations in the Middle East. During his years of exile in Europe, he crossed the law many times. The Mossad found him strange and unstable.

The barman watched as Ofir led Rabah to his table. The two were an odd couple. Rabah, in his olive-green jacket, baggy jeans, and five o’clock shadow, looked shabby; Ofir, in a leather jacket and turtleneck, was in his holiday clothes. As they made their way to the corner table, Ofir felt suddenly alone. He looked over his shoulder—Rabah was gone. On the floor was a faded brown knapsack. “A bomb!” Ofir thought. He moved to the sturdy bar, putting some distance between himself and the bag, seeking shelter from the imminent blast. As he had been trained to do, he tamped the turbulence out of his voice and asked the barman in fluent French whether, perhaps, he had seen his buddy. The barman pointed to the bathroom door just as Rabah was emerging.

“Where’d you go?” Ofir asked, approaching Rabah.

“I really had to piss. I couldn’t wait.”

Ofir’s suspicions only intensified. Something is off, he thought to himself.

They went back to the table. Ofir sat down first. Rabah, lingering behind him, circled toward his seat, pulled out a Smith & Wesson
.38,
and unleashed a quick burst of fire. The first bullet hit Ofir in the ear; the second went in through his neck and out through his shoulder; the third caught him square in the chest; and the fourth went in through his shoulder and lodged itself in his stomach cavity. Ofir got out of his chair, took a few steps, and asked for an ambulance before collapsing. Rabah fled the café in a dead run as pandemonium broke out. Ofir’s life was saved at St. Pierre Hospital in Brussels. The scenes from that day still haunt him.

In Beirut, Black September claimed responsibility for the hit in Brussels. The story generated enormous publicity. Papers all over the world carried accounts of the Israeli Mossad
katsa
shot by an Arab agent just five days after the Munich Massacre.

In less than a week, Black September had gone from near anonymity to public enemy number one in Israelis’ perception. No one knew their next target. The defense establishment and the Mossad were asked for answers; they had nothing definitive. The files on Black September contained slivers of intelligence, bits of unchecked information that could not be cross-referenced, about operatives who may or may not have been affiliated with the mercurial organization.

On Tuesday, September 19, the mailroom in the Israeli embassy in London was bustling. Letters had piled up over the long Yom Kippur weekend, the Jewish Day of Atonement. No one in the mailroom noticed the four slim, identical envelopes sent from Amsterdam with handwritten addresses. Three of them remained sealed, but the fourth was delivered to Dr. Ami Shchori, forty-four, an agricultural attaché set to return to Israel in the coming weeks. He was chatting with a colleague when the envelope was delivered. “This is important,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for it.” He was expecting flower seeds from Holland. When Dr. Shchori opened the envelope he released a tiny spring, which hit a detonator smaller than an aspirin tablet, and set off the two five-inch strips of plastic explosive. Although they weighed only fifty grams, the explosives triggered a powerful blast, hitting Shchori in the abdomen and chest. He died of his wounds.

Black September was staying on the offensive. A week after the attempted assassination in Brussels they sent out sixty-four identical letter bombs from Amsterdam to Israeli diplomats in New York, Ottawa, Montreal, Paris, Vienna, Geneva, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Kinshasa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. All of the standard-sized envelopes were detected and neutralized except for one—in London. The Israeli embassy in Kensington had been briefed about terror attacks, including the possibility of letter bombs. This was not a new tactic. The PFLP had employed the same approach to terrorism earlier in the year, sending fifteen letters from Austria and Yugoslavia to Israeli businessmen in Israel. All of them were detected and no harm was done. But the Black September campaign was far more professional: their letters bore fewer telltale signs and the explosive devices were more complex and harder to detect.

With no publicity or fanfare the Mossad refreshed its own campaign of mail-borne death. Mossad explosives experts created the letter bombs—a quick and easy way to hit senior Palestinian activists, without the time-consuming and dangerous effort required of face-to-face assassinations. On October 24, the Mossad’s own campaign of terror began: Mustafa Awad Abu-Zeid suffered severe facial injuries when he opened a letter in Tripoli; Abu-Khalil, a PLO representative in Algeria, was badly wounded by a letter several days later; Farouk Kadumi and Ha’il Abed el-Hamid were left unscathed by a faulty bomb in Cairo; Omar Tzufan, a PLO activist and the director of the Red Crescent, lost all of his fingers from a letter bomb delivered to Stockholm; Adnan Hammad, a member of the Palestinian Students’ Organization, was critically wounded in Bonn; Ahmed Awdullah, a Palestinian student in Stockholm accused of aiding and abetting terrorism, lost an arm.

Not one of the recipients had any direct ties to Black September. Most of the injured and the dead were PLO ambassadors and affiliates, unofficial diplomats. According to the defense establishment, though, they were field agents—Black September operatives who moved freely under the cloak of respectability while gathering operational intelligence for their masters in Beirut. The maiming of these people was meant to sow fear and confusion among activists in the PLO and Fatah’s Black September. The Mossad’s aim was to create a sense of permanent threat in the minds of Palestinian operatives and potential inductees, a violent persuasion to cease, or shy away from, all activity on the behalf of terrorists.

19
                  
FIRST MAN DOWN

ROME, PIAZZA ANNIBALIANO MONDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1972, 2130H

Mike Harari felt the familiar drumbeat of adrenaline in his neck. “The target has left the girlfriend’s house. He’s on his way to the bus stop,” the commander of the surveillance team reported. Harari, forty-five, a chain-smoking Humphrey Bogart look-alike, checked his watch. He estimated that in just under an hour the two-week undercover operation would come to a close. He and about fifteen Caesarea combatants and staff officers under his command were on the verge of assassinating Wael Zu’aytir, the first individual to be brought by the Mossad before the prime minister and defense cabinet since the Munich Massacre.

A tall, thin man from a family of intellectuals and teachers, Zu’aytir, thirty-six, was a single Palestinian who had been living in Rome for the past sixteen years. He was presented to the prime minister and the defense cabinet as a man inextricably linked to Black September’s terror operations in Italy. They were told that he was head of Fatah’s Black September in Rome and that he had aided and abetted the attack in Munich. He was unceremoniously sentenced to death.

Harari didn’t care to examine Zu’aytir’s terrorist credentials. He saw himself as a contractor who, less than three weeks prior, had been given an assignment. His job was to fulfill the task, not analyze it. His team had been working undercover for over two weeks, on foot and in cars, from close and afar, watching Zu’aytir’s every move. Now they followed him as he walked toward his apartment building in northern Rome on the Piazza Annibaliano. Just before 2230, he stopped at the Trieste bar near his house, made a phone call, and came back out to the chilly autumn air.

Two weeks of monitoring Zu’aytir led to a simple assassination plan. Zu’aytir, who worked as a translator at the Libyan embassy, was a soft target. He walked around in the open, unarmed. He allowed his habits to slip into routine. Harari and R., his chief intelligence officer, drew up a plan built on Zu’aytir’s predictable schedule: two assassins would wait and then kill him at the entrance to his home.

Caesarea’s surveillance team never questioned Zu’aytir’s humble lifestyle, despite intelligence reports that he was a master terrorist. Unlike many PLO employees, he led a modest life. His bills were never paid on time; the telephone in his rather bare apartment had been disconnected. His circle of friends included members of the Italian Communist Party, poets, and writers, including the author Alberto Moravia. His girlfriend, Janet Venn Brown, was Australian. She was the last person he met that night. They enjoyed a pleasant dinner together.

Zu’aytir loved music and books. Before moving to Rome he’d studied classical Arabic literature and philosophy at the University of Baghdad. After studying in Iraq, he moved to Libya and from there to Rome, his permanent home. He was a gifted linguist who spoke impeccable French, Italian, and English. In his free time he read voraciously. He translated political articles and prose into Arabic and from Arabic to Italian. His greatest achievement was an Italian translation of the Arabic classic
One Thousand and One Nights.

The Palestinian cause was undoubtedly dear to Zu’aytir, a native of the Palestinian city of Nablus, and he was in close contact with other Palestinian activists in Italy, going to rallies and parlor discussions together. But unlike many of those around him, he denounced terrorism and violence.

The Mossad did not buy into Zu’aytir’s public persona. They maintained that he was a senior operative working undercover, a Jeykll and Hyde character who posed as a moderate Arab intellectual but was in fact a bloodthirsty terrorist, responsible for numerous attacks. They alleged that on August
16, 1972,
he masterminded an attack on an El Al flight out of Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome. A tape recorder packed with powerful explosives blew up in the cargo hold as soon as the flight reached cruising altitude, but the blast was absorbed by the newly installed armored walls in the underbelly of the aircraft. The pilot, faced with a panel of screaming red and yellow lights, was able to put the plane down in an emergency landing six terrifying minutes later in Rome.

In early August, Zu’aytir was rounded up by Italian police, perhaps heightening Israeli suspicions. The police questioned him about an oil refinery bombing that had been claimed by Black September. He was released along with dozens of other Palestinians. In September, his brother, an illegal alien and a student, was thrown out of West Germany along with thousands of other Palestinians after the attack.

At 2230 hours
,
he walked into Entrance C of his apartment complex. He was wearing a lightweight gray blazer, a black trench coat, and a checkered shirt. He carried a basket of groceries—some rolls, a bottle of cheap wine, and a newspaper—that he had bought after leaving Venn Brown’s house. Harari’s combatants were spread out in their positions, alert and electric with tension. Surveillance gave the all-clear and reported that Zu’aytir was on his way to the house, alone. The escape car, a Fiat 125 that had been rented earlier by an undercover Caesarea combatant posing as a Canadian tourist, idled two
90-
degree turns away.

The two assassins waited in the darkened anteroom. They watched Zu’aytir enter the building and make his way toward the elevator before they stepped out of the shadows and shot him twelve times with a silenced Beretta
0.22.
He was hit in the chest and head, and dropped to the ground in a lifeless heap. The two assassins walked out of the building quickly, their guns inconspicuously by their side. The squad commander watched their backs as they made their way to the getaway car.

Minutes later, Mike Harari, his staff officers, and Zvi Zamir, who had come to Italy to personally oversee the mission, received word from the commander of the hit squad in the field. The signal released the tension in the air. Officers went from pensive waiting to quick action, gathering papers and packing bags. Within four hours, all the Mossad officers and combatants, from Zamir to the most junior member of the surveillance team, had left Italy by plane, train, and automobile.

Earlier that day, at four in the afternoon, the fourth plenum of the Knesset convened. As is customary, the prime minister delivered an address from the podium. Golda was well aware that the first act of retribution after Munich was under way. She kept her comments general. “This war, by definition, cannot be defensive; we must actively seek out the murderers, their bases, their missions and their plans . . . .” Golda refused to open the subject to debate, declaring, “I speak for the entire government of Israel when I say again that we have no choice but to strike at terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace. We shall fulfill that obligation undauntedly.”

The investigation into the murder of Zu’aytir was never closed. Detectives picked up clues from the assassination site, including the rented getaway cars, but they all led to dead ends. There were no suspects and no arrests. A senior Roman police official was quoted in the next day’s paper as saying that their working assumption was that the assassination was politically driven and carried out by a Jewish group.

As the mission to assassinate Zu’aytir unfolded, Golda decided to create a post in her office for a personal advisor on terrorism. She chose Major General Aharon Yariv, the professional and charming newly retired head of Military Intelligence. Some saw the nomination as a slap in the face to Zamir—a public display of no confidence. In fact, Golda recognized the need for someone to reorganize the intelligence community in a way that would allow a fluid campaign against the new threat of overseas terrorism. She needed someone willing to enforce cooperation and order among the different intelligence bodies, each insistent on maintaining its administrative and operational independence.

Yariv, fifty-two, with his piercing blue eyes, mild manners, unassuming personality, and inner calm, was the perfect man for the job. With time, the heads of the intelligence organizations realized that he did not pose a threat to their authority. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said at Yariv’s funeral in 1994, “He was a man bereft of pretentiousness; who always spoke in question marks, never exclamation points, who always researched, asked, inquired, never banged on the table, and never saw himself as the final arbiter.”

As soon as he took the reins, Yariv clarified the jurisdiction of each intelligence agency. He instituted a weekly forum in an office in the red-roofed, single-floor residence of the prime minister in Tel Aviv. Attending were the deputy director of the Mossad, Shlomo Abarbanel; director of Shabak, Yosef Harmelin; the head of Military Intelligence’s Branch 4, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Mor; and several other select members—approximately ten in all. The meetings began with an overview of the week’s attacks or attempted attacks. Lieutenant Colonel Mor presented the new warnings of possible terror attacks in Israel and abroad. After that the floor was turned over to the principals. They offered their interpretations of the intelligence and discussed the best course of action.

Yariv’s personality was pivotal to the success of the weekly conferences. His reputation, experience, respect for others, and congeniality neutralized the fears many harbored about sharing information. The representatives of the Shabak, Mossad, and Branch 4 shared their most sensitive intelligence. “Everything was on the table,” Lieutenant Colonel Mor said. “Those meetings provided the infrastructure for cooperation. What happened in there was unprecedented.”

Over the years, Zu’aytir’s guilt came to be taken as fact. A steady stream of intentional leaks from the defense establishment tied him to terror attacks against Israeli targets in Italy. Nonetheless, some remained skeptical about the intellectual’s ties to terrorist operations. Years later, the truth seeped out. “As far as I remember, there was some involvement on his part in terrorist activities; not in operations but in terrorist activities: supplying, helping, let us say ‘support’ activities,” Yariv explained in the BBC interview in 1993. He went on, trying to vindicate Israel’s assassination campaign: “You must remember the situation. Activity continued on their part and the only way we thought we could stop it—because we didn’t have any interest in just going around and killing people—was to kill people in leadership roles. And it worked in the end. It worked.”

The candid interview hit members of the intelligence community like a bomb in a closed room. They were furious. It was the first time a senior Israeli official, the advisor to the prime minister on counterterrorism, had broken the code of silence.

Zu’aytir was not directly involved in the Munich Massacre. It also seems unlikely that he had an indirect hand in the operation as a
saya’an.
Uncorroborated and improperly cross-referenced intelligence information tied him to the support network of Black September in Rome. From there, a slippery slope led the politically active, low-level
saya’an
to the Mossad’s hit list. Looking back, his assassination was a mistake. Undoubtedly, it resulted from the genuine desire to neutralize those involved in the Munich Massacre and “hot” operatives in the midst of preparing an attack. Zu’aytir was, at best, a small fish in a pond full of sharks. But in the vengeance-laced atmosphere of September and October 1972, when the head of the Mossad proclaimed that the mysterious, bohemian translator had blood on his hands, no one was in the mood to dispute it.

The Palestinians did not attribute the assassination to error. The “Voice of Palestine” from Baghdad announced Zu’aytir’s death the following day. “The Palestinian National Liberation Movement has lost one of its most prominent, leading, and struggling members, a
shahid
and hero, Wael Zu’aytir, the representative of Fatah in Italy, who was assassinated by Zionist intelligence at 2245 yesterday when he was returning to his home in Rome.”

This time, the conspiratorial Palestinian interpretation of current events was correct. The radio announcer continued in Arabic: “Fatah wishes to draw the attention of the world to the fact that the assassination of the hero Wael Zu’aytir is part of the Zionist terror campaign being carried out by the enemy throughout the world. Fatah stresses again that the pursuit and assassination of our fighters will only increase its determination to carry on with its struggle and revolution. It is a revolution until victory.”