Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (8 page)

13
                  
IT’S ALL OVER

GERMANY, FÜRSTENFELDBRUCK AIRFIELD WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1972, 0030H

“I hope I’ll be proven wrong but that last explosion—the one after the shooting—didn’t sound good to me. I hope the German broadcaster was right. I don’t have a good feeling about this. I won’t say the Israelis are safe and sound until I see them with my own eyes. I hope to be back on the air in the morning with more encouraging updates and reports of a positive outcome. Good night.” This was how Yeshayahu Ben-Porat, a leading Israeli radio reporter, closed a virtual marathon of live coverage from Munich.

Several minutes later, Zamir and Cohen stumbled out of the administration building, through the smoke and smoldering ash, to the two deathly still helicopters on the tarmac, hoping to find survivors. “I descended the stairs,” Cohen recalled, “and went over to the first helicopter. There were spreading pools of blood around and under the helicopters. The doors were open and I saw a horrifying vision of five hostages, tied together and stuffed into the back bench, each man’s head resting on the shoulder of the man next to them. There was no movement, not a groan or a raspy breath, and the blood, the blood was flowing out of the helicopter and collecting in puddles on the asphalt. I saw no need to go over to the second helicopter, the burnt one. We were shocked. Total silence surrounded us. Genscher and Strauss came out of the office building and walked over to us. They shook our hands, and mumbled some words of consolation.”

The helicopters had taken off for Fürstenfeldbruck at 2200 hours
,
leaving hundreds of journalists behind, while hundreds of millions of viewers across the world remained riveted to their screens, waiting to see how the saga would play out.

Once the helicopters left the Olympic Village, reporters were starved for credible information. Precious time elapsed until they learned that the terrorists and their hostages had flown to Fürstenfeldbruck airfield (and not Munich International Airport). Reporters were forced to serve up live, on-air speculation about every rumor that floated their way. It was impossible to cut the live broadcast and promise a roundup later in the night. The news stations’ prerogative held sway: the show must go on.

Thousands of reporters and spectators gathered behind Fürstenfeldbruck’s outer fences. They had been denied entry, and in the darkness, hundreds of yards away, it was difficult to discern what was happening on the airfield. A general assumption spread through the crowd: the terrorists would be transferred from Fürstenfeldbruck to a Middle Eastern country, with or without the hostages.

This optimistic assumption was dashed at the sound of gunfire. As the firefight continued, uncertainty and confusion grew. Technical problems prevented radio and telephone communication between the officials stationed at the airfield and the administrators at the Olympic Village.

Rumors raged. Slightly after 2300 hours
,
a report circulated among the spectators at the airport gates and spread to the Olympic Village: the Israeli hostages had been rescued following a battle between the police and the terrorists; the terrorists had all been killed. In the absence of any real knowledge, this ideal outcome was exactly what people desperately wanted to believe, and it was presented as fact. The source of the information was unclear and yet everyone—reporters, politicians, bystanders, and family members—clung to it. Reuters, the international news agency, sent out an exclusive wire report at
2331:
“All Israeli hostages have been freed.”

All attempts to check the facts with officials at Fürstenfeldbruck failed. Despite the lack of confirmation, the pressure on German chancellor Willy Brandt to go on the air and announce the good news to the German nation was immense. His political instincts would not allow him to do it, however. He sent his press secretary, Conrad Ahlers, to speak to ABC’s Jim McKay around midnight. “I am very glad that as far as we can see now, this police action was successful. Of course, it is unfortunate that there was an interruption of the Olympic Games but if all comes out as we hope it will . . . I think it will be forgotten after a few weeks.”

The good news spread like wildfire through the Olympic Village and around the world. At last, a happy ending. The village erupted with celebrating athletes popping champagne corks, hugging, smiling, and crying with joy. The members of the International Olympic Committee along with German and Israeli politicians relaxed for the first time in nineteen hours. In Israel, relatives and friends showed up at athletes’ family homes with flowers and champagne. For most Israelis it was difficult to hold their spontaneous joy in check. They did not heed Yeshayahu Ben-Porat’s advice to wait until the hostages appeared before the cameras.

For the families of the hostages, caution came by instinct. Ankie Spitzer, the wife of fencing coach Andrei Spitzer, was at her parents’ home in Amsterdam. A wave of joy swept the room when they learned of the Reuters news flash. People jumped to their feet. Ankie, composed, told everybody to wait. “Andrei will call and when we hear his voice, we’ll celebrate,” she told her family. A similar scene played out at the Gutfreund and Springer homes. Rachel Gutfreund, wife of the towering wrestling referee, refused to celebrate even when her children joined in the general revelry. Rosa Springer asked that her guests not open the champagne until she heard her husband’s voice.

Ankie, Rosa, and Rachel would never hear those voices. The truth reached the media just after three in the morning. At 0317 hours Reuters sent a corrected message over the wires: “Flash! All Israeli hostages seized by Arab guerrillas killed.”

Jim McKay immediately broadcast the devastating update to the world. He looked straight into the camera and said: “I have just gotten the final word. When I was a kid my father used to say, ‘Our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized.’ Tonight, they have been realized . . . . They’ve now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning. Nine were killed at the airport tonight . . . . They are all gone. It’s all over . . . . I have nothing else to say.”

Half an hour before the world heard the news, just before three in the morning, the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, placed a call to Prime Minister Golda Meir’s private residence in Jerusalem. It was the first thing he did upon returning to the Olympic Village. He had not heard the false reports of safety or the celebrations they had sparked. The prime minister grabbed the phone on the first ring. Zamir spoke first. “Golda . . . I have bad news,” he said softly. “We just returned from the airport, all nine were killed . . . not one was saved.”

Golda could not believe it. She had been watching TV and listening to the radio.

“But they reported . . .” she protested, trying to stave off the dreadful truth, shocked and dejected.

“I saw it with my own eyes,” Zamir said. “No one was left alive.”

14
                  
NO ACCOUNTABILITY

MUNICH, OLYMPIC VILLAGE, COMMUNICATIONS CENTER
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1972, 0400H

More than two thousand journalists from all over the world gathered at daybreak at the Olympic Village’s communications center to listen to West German and Bavarian officials recount their version of events. They carefully avoided taking any personal or state-level responsibility for the tragedy. Instead they blamed the Israelis and the Palestinians: the Israelis were faulted for their intractable refusal to release Palestinian prisoners; the Palestinians, they claimed, performed their deadly mission with such accuracy and skill that the Germans were powerless to prevent the tragedy. “Some people say that police mistakes caused the death of the hostages,” Manfred Schreiber, the Munich police chief, said. “But it was the other way around. The hostages died because the terrorists made no mistakes.”

The German failure has no modern equivalent. The amateurishness, negligence, miscalculations, and mistakes made in the management of the crisis are unparalleled. To this day, no one has ever claimed responsibility for the failure to stop the Olympic massacre: not the Bavarian government, not the Federal Republic of Germany, nor any other German office.

The errors in the planning and organization of the police rescue mission at the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield under the command of Georg Wolf, as supervised by Schreiber, are particularly intolerable and maddening. They do not comprise the Germans’ only failures but are worth examining. The operational components of the plan attest, at best, to the unprofessional and negligent handling of the mission. At worst, the results of the mission point to a reprehensible cowardice and an unforgivable dereliction of duty. The squad in the field had five hours to prepare for the mission, which is an eon in a hostage situation. The mission was ideally staged—in a military airport, with no civilians nearby. The police could easily plan where the helicopters would land and at which angle they would be placed in relation to the marksmen. They could have blinded the terrorists with carefully positioned lights and orchestrated a well-timed strike.

The colossal failure of the marksmen is particularly inexcusable. From the internal West German report completed after the operation, it came to light that the five marksmen, two of whom were Bavarian riot police and the other three Munich policemen, were chosen based on a competition held months earlier. They had never received professional training as sharpshooters. They had no special abilities as far as psychological condition, shooting techniques, and operational tactics were concerned. “I had no special training in gun shooting or anything similar. But I practiced pistol shooting as a private hobby,” Marksman 2 said in his debriefing.

These so-called marksmen were given G3 and FN rifles, which are far from tactical-level precision weapons. They were on duty from the early morning. At 2240 hours
,
some of them had been on their feet for fourteen to fifteen hours, which robbed them of the inner calm necessary to function as a sharpshooter in the tense, potentially chaotic storm of a hostage liberation mission.

Another element of the negligence and amateurishness of the operation was rooted in the lighting setup. Three Polymar reflectors, known as lighting giraffes, were brought to the scene on Wolf’s orders. There was no moon, and the reflectors were not strong enough to light up the night. An ideal lighting situation would either have blinded the terrorists and left the sharpshooters in the dark, like the audience in a theater, or kept the scene in total darkness and equipped the sharpshooters with infrared scopes, which would have afforded them a tactical edge over the terrorists. The pale middle ground created a situation where the marksmen could not tell whether the terrorists in the shadows beneath the helicopters were alive or dead, and left the inside of the helicopters, where the hostages sat shackled and terrified, as dark as a cavernous hole at night.

The police gunmen were unprotected. They had no helmets and no bulletproof vests. But the worst sin of all was in the communication between forces. In order for a sniper strike to have any hope of success, the attack must begin when each shooter has the head of his prey square in his sights. A commander then commences a slow countdown, allowing each sniper time to communicate last-second changes. As the countdown nears the “fire” command, each sniper steadies his breathing, so that they pounce together, squeezing the trigger in unison, as they exhale the last of a calculated breath. In that way the element of surprise is preserved, each terrorist taking a bullet at the same time. The importance of a communication system is vital to the success of a counterterrorism mission, which is often complex and continuously shifting. In this instance, a proper communication system would have enabled the authorities to pass on the actual number of targets in real time.

An enduring question from that day revolves around the number of marksmen. The police had nineteen gunmen available that day. In any special operations mission, there should be at least two skilled snipers per target. In this situation, where the men lacked experience, visibility was poor, and targets were mobile, they should have stationed three or four, even five shooters on each terrorist. Schreiber explained that he needed to keep some of his men in reserve in the Olympic Village and some of them at Munich International Airport in case the terrorists decided to change course. Still, the answer does not satisfy the question of why the central arena of operation, the Fürstenfeldbruck airfield, had less than a third of the available Bavarian marksmen.

For years after the massacre, victims’ family members sought information that would shed light on the circumstances of their loved ones’ deaths. There were many unanswered questions. They sought access to autopsy logs and ballistic reports. “I wanted a full account of what really happened from the Germans,” Ankie Spitzer said. “Nobody seemed to be able to explain who was at fault. Who shot whom at the airport?”

The German government instituted a red-tape jungle of bureaucracy, shuffling requests from one office to another without providing any answers. After several years, the Germans claimed that they did not have any evidence from the crime scene. This made Ankie Spitzer suspicious: it did not seem possible that such a ghastly and public tragedy would go uninvestigated. A proud and graceful woman who speaks Dutch, German, English, French, and Hebrew fluently, Spitzer refused to accept Germany’s excuses. She demanded to know what really happened in Munich on every commemoration day, in each public forum, in the pages of all the newspapers.

For more than thirty years, Ankie Spitzer and Ilana Romano, widow of Yossef Romano, have been representing the interests of the bereaved families. The two women have met with almost every high-ranking German official who has visited Israel since 1972. In these brief meetings, grudgingly agreed to by the Germans, Spitzer and Romano requested the release of all the documents pertaining to the Munich Massacre. For over two decades promises were made and then broken by the German politicians. The reports never arrived.

The German authorities hoped that the Israeli families’ resolve would weaken, but the two widows did not relent. Sparks of hope were lit and then left to flicker. The Germans did not intend to release any information on the subject. They certainly were not going to accept any responsibility or apologize for the massacre on their soil.

The greatest disappointment came in 1976, when Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister of Germany at the time of the massacre, came to Israel on an official visit as Germany’s foreign minister. Genscher had remarked that the day he walked into the hostages’ room in Apartment 1, saw the dead man splayed on the floor, the blood in a puddle by his feet, and the terrified look on the hostages’ faces, was the worst of his life. Yet he refused to meet the representatives of the families. Only Ankie Spitzer’s desperate threat to prevent his plane from taking off convinced his assistant to schedule a meeting with Spitzer and Ilana Romano at the West German embassy in Tel Aviv. Their meeting began at six in the morning and lasted fifteen minutes.

Genscher sat silently through Spitzer and Romano’s presentation. They requested that all previously withheld information about the event be released. They asked that West German authorities draft a compensation plan for the surviving families, and build a memorial for the victims. Genscher listened stone-faced. He said he would reply to their requests in writing. His answer arrived at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem ten months later.

The official letter was so inadequate, it was disrespectful. Genscher denied government possession of documents relating to the Munich Massacre. As for compensation, Genscher wrote that the West German government was prepared to grant scholarships to two of the children of the victims for one year of study in West Germany. The scholarships, according to Genscher, would only be given to children who could prove financial need. The letter did not address Spitzer and Romano’s request for a memorial. The compensation plan did not even attempt to meet the needs of the thirty-four widows, fatherless children, and bereaved parents whose lives were devastated by the massacre. The families refused to accept the inadequate offer, and resolved to continue their fight for information.

Spitzer and Romano did not receive a significantly greater degree of assistance from the Israeli government. Though the eleven murdered athletes and coaches had been sent to Munich to represent the state, Israel offered neither political nor financial help to the families. Left alone to deal with the implacable German federal authorities, Spitzer and Romano were forced to manage an international dialogue from their homes, rather than through proper diplomatic channels. There is no clear explanation for Israel’s official policy—their unwillingness to pursue the truth of that night.

A conflict of interest may explain their reluctance. In the 1970s, security ties between Israel and West Germany were greatly expanded, and West German intelligence agencies worked closely with their Israeli peers. Joint secret missions and intelligence exchanges were carried out on a regular basis. Sayeret Matkal and the Yamam, Israel’s two leading counterterror units, assisted the West German government in establishing the German GSG
-9
counterterror unit, under the command of General Ulrich Wagner.

Twenty years of deadlock came to an end in the spring of 1992. Several weeks before the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, Ankie Spitzer made an emotional appeal to German viewers in an interview on ZDF television. She spoke of her fruitless quest to discover the truth about the Munich Massacre and her husband’s death. She reiterated her refusal to accept German claims that there were no documents from that night. Spitzer stole viewers’ hearts with her powerful message, delivered in German.

Two weeks later, she received a call from an unidentified German government official. “There is information, you’re absolutely right,” he said. “I have access to the information.” Spitzer had been plagued for years by crank callers pushing conspiracy theories and false information. She dismissed the man as another such and directed him to Pinchas Zeltzer, the Israeli lawyer representing the victims’ families. Zeltzer, however, took the caller seriously. The German government worker told the lawyer he had access to documents. He offered to send a sample of the papers. “I’ve been waiting for this material for twenty years,” Zeltzer told him. “Send everything you can.” Zeltzer promised to keep his source confidential, come what may.

A messenger arrived at Zeltzer’s office door two weeks later holding a brown envelope with original documents from the West German investigation of the massacre. There were thirty pages of autopsy logs for Andrei Spitzer, David Berger, and Yossef Gutfreund. There were ballistic reports on almost all the eleven victims. In total, there were eighty original typewritten pages collected from different dockets, suggesting a wealth of documents amassed by the German authorities in the aftermath of the massacre. They had been stored in the Bavarian archives for twenty years, hidden from the eyes of the public.