Lessons from the Munich massacre

Thirty years ago, on September 5, 1972, a group of men were sighted scaling a six-foot wire fence on Kuzoczinskidamm, about 50 yards from the sleeping quarters of Israel's athletes in Munich's Olympic village. The intruders were first noticed around 4 a.m., but it wasn't until half an hour later that one of them inserted a pass-key into the lock of the door leading to the vestibule of Apartment 1 at 31 Connollystrasse.

For the next 25 minutes the eight fedayeen ("men of sacrifice," as they called themselves), battled the Israeli athletes inside 31 Connollystrasse, a complex that also housed contestants from Uruguay and Hong Kong. The fedayeen belonged to the Palestinian group Black September, linked to Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah. Though they were equipped with hand grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles while the Israelis were unarmed, the fight was not entirely uneven. The athletes in Apartments 1 and 3 included wrestlers and weightlifters. They managed to fracture the nose of one attacker and stab another in the forehead.

The initial phase of the assault ended by 5 a.m. The fedayeen shot and killed two Israelis -- wrestling coach Moshe Weinberger and weightlifter Yossi Romano -- and captured nine. Two Israeli athletes escaped, and the intruders failed to locate another eight in the building.

The negotiations that followed lasted the rest of the day. The Palestinians demanded that "the military regime in Israel" free 234 prisoners. They also sought the release of urban terrorist leaders Ulrika Meinhof and Andreas Baader, captured by the West German police a few months earlier, and wanted to be flown to "a safe destination."

At around 10:30 p.m., the terrorists and their captives were transported in two helicopters to Munich's Fürstenfeldbrück airport. One chopper held four Israeli athletes, the other five. Once they landed, four of the fedayeen got out to inspect a 727 jet that was ostensibly being prepared to take them and their hostages to Cairo. As the four Arabs were walking to the plane, German police sharpshooters opened fire at them.

The gun battle that followed lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes. The fedayeen took cover under the helicopters. When, at midnight, the police launched an assault by six armoured vehicles, one of the terrorists lobbed a hand grenade into one helicopter. The explosion incinerated Olympians Amitzur Shapira, David Marc Berger, Andrei Spitzer, Mark Slavin and Kehat Shorr. At almost the same time the terrorists shot and killed Zeev Friedman, Yacov Springer, Eliezer Halfin and Yossef Gutfreund bound up in the other helicopter.

Ironically, had the assault been delayed a few more minutes, the four athletes might have been able to free themselves. There were teethmarks found on the knots of the thick ropes tying them to their seats.

The massacre at the Olympic games opened a new chapter in the war on terrorism. Five of the Black Septembrists were killed during the firefight and three were captured, but they were only the foot-soldiers of terror. Israel's then prime minister, Golda Meir, was resolved to go after the architects of the Munich massacre. This led to the much-debated policy of targeted assassinations.

In the years that followed, Israel launched various operations that resulted in the killing of terrorist organizers. They included the poet Wael Zwaiter in Rome (October 1972), the Algerian theatre director Mohammed Boudia in Paris (June 1973), and the PLO's liaison man with the KGB, Abad al-Chir, in Nicosia (January 1973), among several others.

Israel did engage in some extra-judicial actions even before Munich, such as the cross-border abduction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1960. But Eichmann's kidnapping, or the 1976 hostage-rescue mission in Entebbe, though technically a breach of international law, aroused only a limited debate. However, the targeted assassination of terrorist leaders was controversial enough for Israel not to admit it publicly for years. Though Israel's role in the assassination of the Munich terrorists was common knowledge (I traced the story of one counter-terrorist team in my 1984 book Vengeance) the government didn't officially acknowledge it until the early 1990s.

The mood has changed since, especially since 9/11. Israel's assassination of individual terrorists -- for instance, by helicopter gunships -- has been a televised news event more than once.

Following 9/11, Western countries have been taking a second look at their own counter-terrorist tactics, including previously disdained measures. Although targeted assassination is now on the table, some experts doubt not only its legality or morality, but its efficacy as well.

The argument is that shooting terrorists solves nothing. Extra-judicial measures exacerbate rather than reduce tensions; they increase rather than decrease terrorist incidents. All valid objections, yet the utility of counter-terrorism cannot be decided on the basis of what it solves or fails to solve.

The police, the courts or the jails are no "solution" to crime, but this doesn't mean that the justice system has no utility. There are battles that need to be fought every day, not necessarily to make the world a better place, but to prevent it from becoming worse.

By assassinating the architects of the Munich massacre, Israel didn't eliminate terrorism. It did eliminate, though, several terrorists who murdered 11 athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The utility of eliminating individual terrorists needs to be measured against the futility of not eliminating them.

As Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya'alon, the Israeli army's chief of staff, put it in an interview with the newspaper Ha'Aretz last week: "As human beings, we want a solution now. Now. But in the situation of Israel, nowism is false messianism. Nowism is the mother of all sins."

To the question: "How long do we have to live by the sword?" Gen. Ya'alon replied by quoting the late Israeli commander Moshe Dayan. When asked in 1969 what the end will be, Dayan replied: "Do not fear, servants of Abraham." In other words, do what is right, and worry about what it achieves later. Resisting terrorism, by killing terrorists if need be, is right. This is the ultimate lesson of Munich. "We have to go back to the ethos of standing fast," Gen. Ya'alon said, "not because I am enamored of that ethos, but because there is no choice."

A front row seat for Munich's terrorism
Patrick Reusse
Star Tribune

Published Sep 5, 2002

Dr. Harvey O'Phelan joined the civilized world in watching in horror as the World Trade Center towers became infernos and collapsed last Sept. 11. He watched this sub-human act and could not avoid the thought he had been an eyewitness three decades earlier when America was introduced to terrorism.

O'Phelan was working in a clinic for United States athletes inside the Olympic Village at the 1972 Munich Games. The clinic was located near the balconies and stairwells on which Palestinian terrorists appeared after seizing 11 members of Israel's Olympic delegation.

"We were within 70 yards of the compound of apartments where the Israelis were staying," O'Phelan said. "It's indelible in my mind -- the vision of the Palestinians lurking around, with their faces covered and carrying the machine guns. The impression on my mind is so strong that I can see those bastards as if it was yesterday."

The yesterday in this case was Sept. 5, 1972.

There had been violence associated with the anti-Vietnam War protests. We had heard of the bombs planted by the IRA and the Basque Separatists. The Black September thugs of Palestine had been involved in several attacks in Europe.

The way we saw it here was when the bad guys and the goofballs attacked, they were after symbols -- buildings or political figures -- and not civilians.

That changed when the Israeli civilians were seized at the Munich Games by eight Black September terrorists. They shot two Israelis to death at the compound, then made sure the nine remaining hostages (including American David Berger) died on the airport tarmac when it became clear they would not be allowed to escape to Cairo on a jet.

There were no limits now. Terrorism was in our faces, live on ABC from Munich, with Jim McKay.

These Olympics had been intended to show Germany's new non-militaristic ways. The security guards at the athletes village and elsewhere were wearing blue leisure suits and were unarmed.

"The fence around the village was V-shaped," O'Phelan said. "You were supposed to come in one end of the V or the other and show an ID to security. Athletes coming back from competition, or coming back from town, did not want to make the long walk to a security entrance.

"So, they started throwing their equipment bags over the fence and climbing over. When you saw someone in an athlete's warmup uniform coming over the fence, you didn't think anything of it. That's how the terrorists wound up getting into the village . . . going over the fence in warmup uniforms."

O'Phelan, a prominent orthopedic surgeon in the Twin Cities, was one of four doctors brought to Munich by the United States Olympic Committee. They manned the clinic around the clock.

O'Phelan had spent the night of Sept. 4 in town, staying with his family. The terrorists came in at 4 a.m. When he arrived on the morning of the 5th, there were armed soldiers at the security gate.

"For the first time all week, I had to show three pieces of ID to get inside," O'Phelan said. "There were athletes walking around, even sunbathing, within view of the terrorists. We didn't have any idea how serious it was at the time. We didn't know they had shot two of the Israelis already."

If O'Phelan was confused being 70 yards away, you can imagine how Bill Allen was feeling 500 miles away in Kiel, West Germany. He was a member of what became a gold-medal winning U.S. Soling sailing team, along with Buddy Melges and Bill Benson.

"The Olympic sailing competition was so far from Munich that we had to fly in for the Opening Ceremonies," Allen said. "I was a 24-year-old kid from Minnesota, and life couldn't be any better. It was a party every night and a great time on the water every day.

"We came in from a race one afternoon and the flags were at half-staff. And, all those security guards in light-blue leisure suits had been replaced by soldiers with guns.

"We all said, 'What the heck is going on?' "

Thirty years later, Allen still doesn't have an answer.

"A dozen years ago, I had a nephew killed in a boating accident," Allen said. "He was born on the same date as my daughter. And, it's the same date as the bombing in Oklahoma City.

"So now I remember my daughter's birthday, and I think of my nephew, and I think of all those people dying in Oklahoma City . . .

"It makes my skin crawl. It makes me cry."

The civilized world has been dealing with those reactions to terrorism since Sept. 5, 1972.

-- Patrick Reusse is at preusse@startribune.com.

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