Posted on 12/31/2005 4:32:26 PM PST by saquin
I was a witness to 30 hours of extraordinary cowardice, incompetence and selfishness, which began at dawn over the village of the 1972 Munich Olympics. The memory of those failures, which led to the deaths of the core of the Israeli team, are as fresh for me now as when they happened.
The 20th Games had been awarded to Munich to erase the memory of Berlin, 1936, and the Nazi salutes to Hitler. The intention was to showcase the new Germany. The guards were unarmed; wore soft-pastel suits; smiled and had been lectured that authoritarian attitudes were unacceptable for the "Friendly Games". The Olympic village was unprotected and left open to attack.
The presence of Israel's team, in post-Holocaust Germany, was symbolic of the changed host country. At the opening ceremony, the team walked behind the Star of David and seemed an insignificant, almost fragile part of the grand event. Then they went back to their quarters, and were forgotten.
On the day the Palestinians struck, I found a vantage point in the Puerto Rican team house, and looked down the walkway to the Israelis' building. In the early afternoon, the Palestinians pushed a prisoner to an upper window, with a pistol at his head. Dressed in a lightweight vest, his hair was dishevelled and he had heavy bruising round his eyes, but he showed an impassive courage. I have never lost the image of that man.
Black September's negotiator was Tony. He was slight and wore a white hat, the sort a high-street butcher might use. He strutted and revelled in his power. The great and the good of the Olympic organising committee, the Munich police, and government came to hear his demands. As a minimal concession, Tony permitted Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister, to enter the building.
Inside, Mr Genscher saw the trussed prisoners and the bloody corpse of one who had tried to fight back. As he stepped over the body, he came face to face with hostages who realised that they were already condemned. Mr Genscher emerged to report that four Palestinians held the building.
It was decided to ambush the kidnappers as they attempted to leave the country with their hostages from the Luftwaffe base at Furstenfeldbruck. Under the West German constitution, the military was not permitted to operate in the Republic. The job was given to the robbery squad of the city police and the rescue plan was cobbled together under fierce pressure.
Black September was told that the Israelis had given in to their demands and released hundreds of Palestinian detainees. The terrorist group and their prisoners were to be flown by helicopter from the Olympic village to the air base, where a waiting airliner was to fly them to an Arab state.
Then the Palestinians who inspected the airliner would be shot on board, and marksmen on the control tower and on the airfield would shoot the others. An Israeli storm squad had arrived in Munich, but the Germans refused to allow the elite troops to take part in the operation.
Then, five minutes before the helicopters were to land at the ambush site, Georg Wolf, the head of Munich's uniformed police and the man responsible for the rescue operation, was told that the officers on the airliner had phoned their union, and quit. Mr Wolf told me: "They said it was suicide. I stood with my hands out and shouted, 'What am I supposed to do now?' A half of our plan had collapsed."
The helicopters landed with the prisoners bound to the seats. Everything depended on the marksmen. But they were not trained snipers, were not issued with sniper rifles nor telescopic sights, and had no radio contact with Mr Wolf. Armoured cars sent to the base were stuck in traffic. Only when the helicopters were on the ground did Mr Wolf realise the gang was eight-strong, not the four that Mr Genscher reported. It was too late to issue fresh instructions to his marksmen.
The shooting was chaotic. Tony and his co-leader survived the initial firing, and grenades were hurled at the Israelis. From the perimeter fence, I saw the tracer rounds arcing through the darkness, then explosions and fire as the helicopters burned with the prisoners trapped in the cabins. The Germans needed an hour to finish the business. They took three Palestinians captive, none of them heroes. Mr Wolf told me: "Those three were very frightened, they begged for pardon, kneeling, holding the policemen's legs. They thought we were going to shoot them."
The next morning, in the main stadium, Beethoven was played and eulogies said and the remainder of the Israeli team sat, heads bowed, weeping. As soon as was half decent, they were on their way home. The other athletes yet to compete had trained for four years to get to Munich and most felt that the conflict between Jew and Arab was not their concern. For the rest of the games, that day and night were airbrushed out.
A month later, in response to the hijacking of a Lufthansa jet, the three surviving Black September men were released and flown to Libya, where I met them. Ibrahim Badran spoke for the group in halting English. He was flabbergasted at my aggressive questioning, as if expecting praise. He is dead now. Of the three, only one has escaped Mossad's executioners.
The carnage in Munich was a shattering blow to the prestige of Israel's intelligence agencies. They had failed to protect their own. The lives of the Israeli athletes were abandoned to the incompetence of the West Germans. Small wonder that Mossad gave the highest priority to hunting and killing those responsible. It seems, with assassinations in Lebanon and North Africa, that the programme was chillingly successful.
• Gerald Seymour, a best-selling author who has written 23 novels, was the ITN reporter covering the Munich Olympics
Sounds like some fat German beaurocrats should have been added to the list.
There's a movie on the dollar rack at the video rental store named "The Sword of Gideon" which shows the Israelis hunting down the dogs responsible for the Munich carnage, pretty good film.
Yet the self loathing Spielberg sees only room for a laying down of arms, all the parties have a point of view that needs to be understood after all.
Apparently, any similarity between this article and the new 'Munich' movie are purely coincidental.
If the movie says "Based on..." it's complete fiction.
I can't even listen to the ads for the Spielberg movie.
I am devestated by how Spielberg turned out. It just makes me sick to my stomach. What a feeling of shame for Spielberg and such sadness for the Israelis. Ugh.
great post most informative
The lessons of the holocaust not learned.
The Mossad never had the chance to rescue the hostages. I wonder if Spielberg is showing the incompetence of the Germans in his movie. It would sure explain why the Israelis were so relentless in going after the Palestinians who planned and committed this atrocity.
Read my tagline.
It is worse than that. After Israeli Mossad found the terrorists, and informed the German, Italian, French governments, they refused to do anything, and even warned the terrorists that Mossad had located them.
Only then, faced with active cooperation of European Governments with evil, did Golda Meir direct the activation of the Mossad operation.
Well, after the Munich debacle, at least Germany did form GSG9, and for a couple of decades it was considered one of the best if not THE best counter terrorism squads in the world....
'Back in the day', I thought I was pretty good, but a few days on a short co-op training mission with a GSG9 team taught me a few tricks.
"I would prefer the Israelis first and foremost, bar none."
What a contrast between the pitiful German effort and the successful Israeli raid on Entebbe, Uganda to rescue hostages held by the PLO and Big Daddy Idi Amin.
Whoa....your tagline says it all. Spielberg is a very, very tragic character...to waste all that talent.
My daughter worked for an airline that employed former Israeli soldiers and agents as its security. She would agree with you about them being the best in the world. :0)
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