"Munich": Spielberg's facts and fiction

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Spielberg's facts and fiction
By Efraim Halevy
The Times (London)
January 21, 2006

The new film Munich purports to be the truth about the aftermath of the 1972 Olympic massacre. But it is based on a deeply flawed book and the real story is to be found elsewhere, a former head of Mossad argues

AS A WORK OF ART, THE FILM Munich must be judged by the public and by professional critics. However, its director, Steven Spielberg, has said that its message relates to the root cause of the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Thus, he has added a political dimension. This is perfectly legitimate and Munich is not the first work of its kind to pursue such a path. Yet once this direction has been chosen, it becomes legitimate to assess the film in terms of its relationship with reality. The less authentic the work, the less credible its message.

The average cinemagoer has no way of separating fact from fiction in Munich. They are told that it is based on events that took place but — beyond the bare facts that 11 sportsmen were murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Black September organisation and that subsequently, several Palestinians were killed by Mossad officers — cannot know if any of the episodes or dialogue are authentic.

The source for Spielberg’s film appears to be a book entitled Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by George Jonas. But to the best of my knowledge, Spielberg made a point of not seeking any contact with Mossad to try to verify the policies or motives of the organisation and its officers.

I do not know if Mossad would have co-operated if he had, but that is immaterial — Spielberg did not wish to gather information from those to whom he ascribes responsibility for the activities that the film describes, preferring to rely on the testimonies of people who have long been discredited as having had nothing to do with the roles that they pretended to fill. Inevitably, the events, modus operandi and the words spoken by the actors are totally divorced from reality.

This goes for the senior Mossad commander, named (I hope by chance) Efraim and for Avner, the squad commander, who is based on a man who has been masquerading for years as a Mossad officer but never served with the organisation. The conversations between Mossad officers do not resemble the way that they speak or think. No remotely successful operation could have been based on the “professional standards” exhibited in the film.

During the years covered by the film, I was serving in Washington and met the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, regularly during her frequent visits to the White House; I remember well her style of conversation; she never spoke in the way shown here.

Artistic licence allows a film to be overwhelmingly fictitious, with only a rudimentary basis in fact. A producer can certainly promote a message even if it is based on a fiction. This is what has been done in Munich.

But anyone wishing to delve into the activities and minds of the Black September organisation would do well to read Assassination in Khartoum, a highly informative book by David A. Korn, a former US State Department official. It tells the story of the Black September raid on the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum in March, 1973, a few months after Munich, and the kidnap of several diplomats attending a reception. No one there was even remotely connected to the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

The kidnappers demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan, who had been jailed in the US for the assassination of the US Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy, in 1968. They also demanded the release of Palestinians in Israeli jails. Washington rejected the demands and three of the diplomats, the Amercians Cleo Noel Jr and George Curtis Moore and a Belgian, Guy Eid, were brutally murdered. One moral yardstick for judging parties to a conflict can be found in their treatment of individuals who have nothing to do with it. An informative insight into the Israeli approach to the events is found in Striking Back, a recent book by Aaron J. Klein.

Nothing illustrates the pitfalls awaiting anyone who wants to make a valid contribution to understanding the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more than the final scene of Munich, which shows the twin towers in New York with the face of the Mossad commander superimposed on them. What does this telling shot convey? That Mossad bears responsibility for the 9/11 al-Qaeda attack? Outlandish? I was Mossad chief in 2001 and had to contend with a wave of emotional reporting that spread like wildfire in the Arab world — that the attack was a Mossad provocation designed to incense American sentiment against Islam and the Arabs.

Reputable senior Arab personalities believed this and the word spread. It was reported that Mossad had an early warning and deliberately withheld it. None of this was true, but in a region that has thrived for centuries on legends and conspiracies, any fantasy can gain credence. The Middle East has witnessed many a tragedy born out of a belief in fantasy.

But I do not think that this is what Spielberg intended to convey. Then what “message” was supposed to be left with the viewer? Certainly, the parting message hardly supports the plea for peace that is alleged to be a centerpiece of the whole endeavour.

Might I recall a saying of the sages: “Wise men, be careful with your words” and add “gifted movie directors — be careful with your shots”.

Efraim Halevy’s Man in the Shadows: Inside the Middle East Crisis with a Man who Led the Mossad will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...000576,00.html

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The Sunday Times Magazine

The Sunday Times January 15, 2006

A thirst for vengeance

Report by Richard Girling
After Palestinian guerrillas killed 11 members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, Israel's intelligence service, Mossad, avenged the deaths with a series of assassinations across Europe. Three decades on, the agents involved have finally revealed their secrets. But what did their killing spree achieve?

It was on the morning of April 10, 1973, that the future prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, woke up to a "comic moment". The joke was irresistible. His young wife, Nava, had discovered a small bag containing feminine clothing and observed that her sleeping husband was wearing eye shadow and lipstick.

"You can imagine," says the now ex-prime minister Barak, "what passed in her mind."

The anxiety was needless. Barak's late homecoming had nothing to do with sexual indulgence. His gratification had been of a more exalted kind, and not everybody would wake to share the joke. When he reckoned it up, the price of his night out in Beirut was 12, perhaps 13 shattered bodies lying in the morgue. If Nava ever doubted his story, then the reassurance was immediate and the proof absolute.

"The TV pictures. . . were quite shocking, even for us," says Barak now. "In daylight it looked like a mini battlefield, with everything, the blood and the glasses and the broken doors. . . everything spread on the floors of the apartments." It was shocking, but that was the point. To strike terror. To "break the will of those who remain alive".

In cities across Europe, the seeds of fear were being sown. In Paris, a man answers the telephone and is blown in half by an exploding table. In Rome, a man entering a lift has two magazines of hollow-nosed bullets pumped into his body and head. Another is killed by an exploding bed. After many attempts on his life, one of which involves the murder of a bewildered Moroccan waiter, the playboy husband of a former Miss Universe is nailed by a car bomb. Beautiful young women loiter in cars while a multinational posse — Swedes, Danes, Canadians, French, English — swarms through the shadows. The only evidence of its passing will be a spectacularly violent, unexplained death, and anonymous telephone calls to a small group of grieving women in Israel: "Listen to the radio news."

It has long been known that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, embarked upon a carefully planned, clinically executed programme of assassinations in revenge for the Munich massacre. Its targets were Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), its militant sub-group, Fatah, and the Black September guerrillas. "Operation Wrath of God", as it became known, is the subject of Steven Spielberg's new film Munich (released in the UK on January 27), and it has lost none of its power to shock. After more than 30 years, it remains the focus of hatred, bitter argument and grief.

Spielberg's film is based on a book — Vengeance, by George Jonas — in which an emotionally unstable, maverick agent known as Avner shuttles around Europe with a team of trigger-happy avengers who have seen too many Hollywood movies. The film has blazing shoot-outs, huge explosions (the team's bomb expert is an idiot toy maker) and gangster-style getaways — everything that is essential to an action movie but anathema to government-sponsored professional assassins. Worse: their movements are directed by a mysterious French godfather and his family-run international anarchy business. Could Mossad really have released such clowns onto the streets?

One of the professional killers involved in the real events that Spielberg says "inspired" him was officer G (as we have agreed to call him). G himself was sent by Mossad to check the identity of "Avner" — real name, Juval Aviv — and found that the nearest he had got to the Israeli secret service was a job as an El Al baggage handler. Jonas's book, says G, is "a fraud" and the film a fiction. He, Barak and others involved in the assassinations have only now decided to reveal what they know. Extraordinarily, too, it was not just Mossad that needed to speak. The Palestinians also wanted to be heard; so did the widows and children of the dead. Their testimony is the basis of a remarkable new television documentary, due to be shown in Britain on January 26.

Some Mossad agents still deny that Israel's head of government was involved in "Wrath of God". But it is a line that cannot hold. Ankie Spitzer, the widow of the murdered Israeli Olympic fencing coach, remembers what she and other relatives were told by the prime minister, Golda Meir. "She said, 'I'll make you a promise. . . I promise we will hunt down those that have blood on their hands in this massacre. We will' — and she said literally — 'we will hunt them down to all corners of the Earth.'" Ehud Barak confirms it. "There was no real doubt," he says, "about Golda Meir's decision to order basically the elimination of those people who were responsible."

It was an order that would be obeyed with exemplary speed. A secret, fast-track bureaucratic chain was set up between Mossad's professional assassins and a panel of ministers, Committee X, that met to sanction each killing. "It was something like a week or two after the attack in Munich," says another hit man, a former army colonel whom we must call officer K. "The head of Mossad said something like, 'Israel is not going to stand still. We are going to get whoever did this, and you will be the stretched arm of this office.'"

Incredibly, the first hit took place on October 16, 1972, just 41 days after the athletes were kidnapped. Its target was Wael Zwaiter, a translator at the Libyan embassy in Rome, who lived unostentatiously in the northern suburbs. Friends knew him as a peaceable, left-wing writer whose work had included an Italian translation of The Arabian Nights. He was the softest of targets: there were no bodyguards, no avoidance of routine, no evident fear of sleeping every night in the same bed. For a professional hit squad, it was absurdly easy.

First on the scene were logistical experts, to arrange communications, accommodation and transport. Next came Tsomet, Mossad's surveillance division, to plot the target's movements. For a sitting duck such as Zwaiter, neither team needed to be large (Israeli security sources suggest between three and six in each). There were uncorroborated reports of just one snag: a group of Italian men took too close an interest in one of the women agents, a Bond-style beauty known as Patricia Roxburgh, who was stationed in a parked car.

At 10.35pm on October 16, after an evening with his Australian girlfriend, Zwaiter entered the lobby of his apartment block and pressed the call button for the lift. Ten seconds later, officers G and K walked from the building to a waiting vehicle and disappeared into the traffic. Thirty-three years later, G needs to be reminded of the victim's name, though he remembers well enough how they finished him.

"We shot him in the entrance to the elevator. Two full magazines. . . " The pistols were James Bond's favourite: lightweight Berettas — short-range, but perfect for a classic Mossad hit: multiple shots fired point-blank.

"The bullets were. . . how do you say? They explode on the inside. Hollow at the front. We used silencers to keep the noise down." For G, the enabling factor was faith in his superiors.

"I have nothing against this guy. If I think of him and his family I get sentimental. I knew what he did, and what he will do. For me he is a target who is doing damage, and I accept my orders."

Over the years, doubts would grow that Zwaiter had anything to do with Munich. It was thought at the time that he had aided the movement of Black September through Libya, but it is now widely believed that the intelligence was faulty. "Wael Zwaiter wasn't involved in Munich, in no way," says Aaron Klein, the author of a forthcoming book on the assassinations. On the Palestinian side, Imad Shakkour, a member of the Fatah revolutionary council who knew many of the victims personally, does not believe Mossad killed Zwaiter by mistake but insists that the reasons were unconnected with Munich.

"Of course I know that Zwaiter had a major role in the political and diplomatic Palestinian work in western Europe. And he had great influence on Italian politics and the Italian government, so it was to the advantage of the Israeli propaganda machine. . . to get rid of him." In the autumn of 1972, with Israel in shock and vengeance craved like analgesics after an amputation, there was little appetite for doubt or reflection. "The people in the street needed revenge," says Klein.

On the morning after Zwaiter's death, the widow Ankie Spitzer's telephone rang. "A person said, 'Listen to the radio, the next news bulletin, which is at 10.' And I said, 'Who's calling?' And they said, 'Never mind.'" The news was of a victory. "They said, 'Israeli commandos liquidated one of the people who were involved in the Munich massacre.'" A few weeks later, the phone rang again. "And this happened three times. . . How can you interpret this? You can think, 'Well, maybe this is an indirect message of Golda Meir, that she kept her word.'"

The death of the second victim, Mahmoud Hamshiri, in Paris in early December, raised the game to a new level. For the Israelis, the outcome had to be more than a blow to the PLO's human resources: there had to be a blow to its psyche too. "We wanted to make them afraid of being a terrorist," says David Kimche, a former deputy head of Mossad who was directly involved in the hits. "We were using psychological elements very, very strongly. . . We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. And therefore. . . we tried not to do things just by shooting a guy in the streets, that's easy. . . But by putting a bomb under the mattress of a guy, to go off when he falls asleep, or by putting a bomb in his phone, this was a message that they can be got at anywhere, at any time and therefore they have to look out for themselves 24 hours a day."

The stock version of the Hamshiri hit, repeated by Spielberg, is remarkable enough. While Hamshiri, the PLO's top man in France,
is meeting an Italian "journalist", Mossad's Keshet ("Rainbow") burglary unit enters his apartment and packs his telephone with explosive. When he goes home they call his number, wait till he answers and then press the remote control. Hamshiri survived long enough afterwards to tell the police that he had heard a "sound peak" on the telephone, thus giving rise to the further myth that the device had been triggered by a sound signal.

In fact, the bomb was not in the telephone at all. What Keshet actually did was photograph Hamshiri's marble telephone table and remove
a small sliver from it. Craftsmen in Tel Aviv then built a replica with plastic explosive inside, and it was this that was smuggled into the apartment. Outside, the surveillance team watched and waited. Three days later, at 9.25am, they reported that Hamshiri's wife and daughter were out and that he was alone in the flat. A telephone call lured him to the table and the bomb was detonated.

According to G, it "blew off the bottom half of him, but not the top half, which was left relatively intact". He says the bomb was made by a "genius of bomb-making" called David, but is less forthcoming about the logistics. Did Mossad weaponry travel to Paris in diplomatic bags? That, he says, "is not an appropriate question".

Bassam Abu Sharif, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) "freedom fighter", former confidant of Yasser Arafat and himself the target of assassination attempts, insists that the dead man had nothing to do with Munich. As it was with Zwaiter, he says, so it was with Hamshiri. It was not terrorism that condemned them, but rather their skill as diplomats. "They were accepted in the European capital to speak out and tell them about the Palestinian people's cause. That was very worrying for the Israelis."

David Kimche, however, is adamant that, even if they were not involved in Munich, all the targets were connected with terror attacks elsewhere. How could he be so sure? "We did our absolute best to get agents alongside them and to get to know what they're thinking, what they're doing, what they're eating for breakfast." This, of course, is not easy. "Terrorists are usually highly motivated, they are dedicated to their cause and they're very suspicious of anyone who's not in their immediate surroundings. . . But around that group. . . you have all sorts of people who are connected with them, whether it's family members or whether it's drivers or messengers
or office boys. . . And these people can very often give you very, very valuable evidence."

Bassam Abu Sharif understands this only too well. Even before the Olympics, he had been targeted for his part in destroying two airliners at Dawson's Field, Jordan, in 1970. In 1972 he was editor-in-chief of Al Hadaf, a weekly publication in Beirut. On July 25, he received a parcel. Inside was a large book with a picture of Che Guevara on the front. "Well, first 10 pages, nothing. And then after the 10th page. . . the heavy book was hollow from the inside and explosive charges were inserted." It cost him an eye and several fingers. But how could it have happened? Every item in the post room was passed through a scanner and checked for explosives — nothing was handed to the addressee unless it was stamped as safe. "Later on," he says, "six people in that department were detained as Israeli agents."

The ordinary desire of people to see their families, says Sharif, gave the Israelis a powerful bargaining tool. "I mean, [they] were occupying the West Bank and Gaza, and people had to work, had to have a licence to import, to export, to travel, and every one of the Palestinians was under that pressure." It called for no great sophistication from the Mossad recruiters. "If you want a licence, if you want to go out, if you want a travel document, work for us. So a lot of people did." Sometimes they used blackmail; sometimes cash. One man, says Sharif, was paid $2m for passing his cousin a booby-trapped mobile phone.

The main target, he says, was always Yasser Arafat, on whose life at least 20 attempts were made. One of these embroiled the man who made Arafat's tea, who was supposed to poison him. "This guy wanted to see his mother, who was under occupation. So the price was to kill Arafat." The attempt failed and the man was sentenced to death. Sharif, however, is convinced that attempts on Arafat's life not only continued but ultimately succeeded at the Percy military training hospital near Paris in November 2004.

"It's not known yet. It needs interrogation, investigation, but I am sure they poisoned him."

Ehud Barak's mission to Beirut began with a small scrap of paper bearing three names and addresses, which Mossad passed to the military special-operations unit, Sayeret Matkal, Israel's equivalent of the SAS. The targets were Abu Yussef (aka Yussef El-Najjar), reputedly chief operations officer of Black September; Kamal Adwan, an operations and intelligence officer of Black September; and Kamal Nasser, PLO spokesman and executive committee member. All lived in the same street, the Rue Verdun. The plan was to make an amphibious landing and strike at night. Mossad agents would be waiting to drive the commandos to the targets.

Barak, then the special-forces commander, decided to travel light. "One of the generals asked, 'How many men do you need?' I say 15. We basically want to send three or four people to each of the apartments and to have two or three of us downstairs and one or two in the cars, and that's it." And so it went. But even so, there was a snag. Fifteen men walking together after midnight would be too conspicuous. A group of men and women would look more natural.

"I was dressed like a young woman in modern clothes," says Barak. "A jacket. . . slightly wider jacket, you know, to be able to hold the mini Uzi, and long trousers with the wider kind of end, you know, like a woman used to wear. And medium-sized heels, to be able to run. I was a brunette, and I had. . . a stocky blonde beside me and there was another blonde. . . And we have everything, make-up, everything on."

The men landed at 1.30am, with special care being accorded to the "ladies". "In order to go on shore," says Barak, "we had not to wet our clothing, so all of us, but especially the ladies, were wrapped in nylon sacks. . . Even on shore, we were carried like babies and put on the dry sand." The drive to the targets took only five minutes. As commander, Barak's duty was to remain in the street and deal with any guards or police while the hit squads went to work. The advantage of surprise was short-lived.

"From one of the cars in front, a bodyguard came out. . . He opened his leather jacket, pulled out a gun and began to cross the street. . . I still remember the shock in his eyes when he saw two ladies. . . opening their own jackets and pulling small guns and begin to shoot."

Kamal Adwan's son, Rami, then aged three, was asleep in his room with his mother and sister. His father, working at his desk, heard a commotion in the stairway. "So he grabbed his gun," says the adult Rami now. "It was just a pistol, and he came to our side. . . and he told [my mother], 'Just hold the kids and don't leave the room.' There were explosions in the building, blowing up the elevators, the entrances in various parts of the building. So it was in no time that my father is standing before the light of the corridor, was under a barrage of gunfire and my mother saw him as he just sort of fell apart from the fire. . . "

Down in the street an intense firefight was under way. "After one minute," says Barak, "a Land Rover full of gendarmes came. We had to shoot it when it came close. And some gendarmes jumped out and began to exchange fire. . . And another one came, another Land Rover, and we had to shoot it too. Once again, it crashed, and by then the three squads came back. It was no more than seven or eight minutes of shooting." There was a delay while they picked up a wounded commando; a third Land Rover had to be shot up; and then they were away, scattering needles to flatten pursuers' tyres. Behind them they had left a bloodbath.

"We killed not just the three terrorists," says Barak, "but seven or eight of the Lebanese armed police. . . The wife of one of the terrorists, she was also killed, and one of the neighbours was killed from the explosive charge that had to open the door. . . The whole story, from the landing to being back in the water, it took 30 minutes."

The hits kept coming. One man, says Bassam Abu Sharif, was "shot in the streets of Paris, right under the eyes of the French police". In Cyprus, a woman agent working with officer K lured a man to his death on an exploding mattress. Given the number of false identities, name changes and Mossad's skill at wiping its fingerprints, it is not easy even now to be sure how many died. The Algerian manager of the Thé‰tre de l'Ouest in Paris, Mohammed Boudia, whose life was ended by a car bomb planted by officer K on June 28, 1973, was reckoned to be the 10th or 11th. Mossad's justification in this case was that Boudia was Black September's top man in France, heavily involved in terrorism. Afterwards, Mossad apparently tried to mislead the French police with anonymous calls suggesting that Boudia had been killed by Corsican mafiosi over a drug deal, which — was it bluff, or double bluff? — raises the question of whether or not local security services were complicit.

Abu Sharif insists that they were, and that this was one of many ways in which western governments favoured the Israelis. "I can tell you for sure, Mossad had agreement with most of the intelligence bodies in Europe. They were allowed to work especially in London and Paris."

Ronen Bergman, the security correspondent of Yediot Ahronoth, Israel's biggest-selling Hebrew newspaper, disputes this. "Mossad had to fight two different enemies. First is the target and the security services guarding him. Second are the local authorities, which are not informed and are going to be very pissed off to know that Mossad is working on their soil without their knowledge." This, he says, was why Mossad moved and operated under such deep cover. "Everybody has the ability to look like a local citizen. . . or at least as a non-Israeli tourist. All of them were either born or grew up in a state that is not Israel. They can all easily bear a disguise — French, Spanish, Arab, English, you name it." They carried authentic passports and had well-rehearsed cover stories.

So how did it happen, in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer only a few days after the Boudia bombing, that all the fabled tradecraft fell apart? Superficially, it might have looked like a classic Mossad hit. Gunshots in the street; a woman screaming; a car pulling away; a man lying dead. The body lying with 13 bullets in it was a big prize: Ali Hassan Salameh, second in the hit list only to Arafat, who Mossad was sure had planned the Munich massacre. They had found him by tracking a courier from Geneva, who met him in a swimming pool, then followed him as he cycled home. On the evening of July 9, when he got off a bus with his pregnant Norwegian fiancée after a visit to the cinema, they shot him.

But the dead man was not Salameh. He was an innocent 35-year-old Moroccan waiter named Ahmed Bouchiki. To call it an error is to understate by several magnitudes the scale of the blunder. Salameh was a suavely dressed, wealthy playboy of sophisticated habit whose girlfriend was the winner of the 1970 Miss Universe contest (he would later marry her) and who lived in Beirut. Bouchiki was a waiter who travelled by bike and lived with a pregnant Norwegian. His misfortune was to resemble a fuzzy photograph of Salameh, clipped from the gossip column of a Lebanese newspaper, which was Mossad's only evidence of identification. Even so, they might have got away with it.

All they had to do was make their usual well-oiled getaway, and the incident would have remained an unexplained, private tragedy for
the dead man's wife and family.

The first of their mistakes was indiscretion. Lillehammer in 1973 was a small town of 20,000 inhabitants, almost all of them fair-haired Nordics. A group of Mediterranean types mouthing into walkie-talkies could hardly pass unremarked (the police initially suspected drug-dealing). Neither had they covered their tracks.

A traffic policeman noting a registration number was all it took to identify the occupants of two cars which they had hired in their own names. They had not even used professional agents. Of the four people arrested, two were untrained, without watertight cover stories or the ability to withstand questioning. One, a Swede called Mariana Gladnikov, was a translator who had been asked to help follow the supposed "courier" from Oslo to Lillehammer, where his chance meeting with Bouchiki at the swimming pool had condemned the waiter to death. Nobody had said anything about murder. When she learnt what had happened, she spilt everything she knew. Also arrested was a Danish businessman, Dan Aerbel, who had helped Mossad in the past, but he, too, was not a professional. His eagerness to confess was accelerated by claustrophobia — he couldn't bear the door of his cell being shut.

Others stuck to their stories. Patricia Roxburgh, a veteran of the Zwaiter hit in Rome and a long-term pursuer of Arafat, continued to protest that she was a Canadian photojournalist (though after prison she stayed in Norway under her "real" name of Sylvia Raphael, and married one of the defence lawyers). It was the same with a fifth individual — a project co-ordinator in Oslo, whose number was found on a note in Aerbel's clothing. "He was a very nice guy," says Leif Lier, the Norwegian detective who led the investigation, "and really clever. I wrote on four, five, six, eight sheets on my typewriter, and when I read it, there wasn't any information there at all." But it made no difference. All five were jailed for their part in Bouchiki's murder, and Israel went into shock. "It was a huge blow," says Aaron Klein. "Until then, every assassination was great, was 100%, and here it's not only that they killed the wrong guy, they were caught. Mossad was in shock. They froze everything, every operative, every operation."

Bad turned to worse — a key belonging to one of the agents led to a Paris apartment where the French intelligence service found keys to other safe houses in Europe; and there was evidence linking Israel with murders in other countries. Committee X was stood down and — officially, at least — Operation Wrath of God was over. In any event, it was soon driven from people's minds. On Yom Kippur, October 6, 1973, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack, and Israel was made to fight for its very survival.

But the escape of Ali Hassan Salameh still festered. More galling even than the Lillehammer fiasco was the sight of Salameh standing behind Arafat when the PLO leader addressed the United Nations in 1974. With or without Wrath of God, Mossad was always going to get him. And in January 1979, it did.

A female agent known as "Erica Chambers" had rented an apartment overlooking Salameh's regular route through Beirut. Because of his 14-strong bodyguard, there was no chance of getting close enough to use the Berettas, or of entering his home. Cruder methods were called for. At four in the afternoon, as Salameh was being driven to the gym, an agent detonated a remote-controlled bomb in a parked car and finally brought the chase to an end.

The Israelis believed that at last they had their revenge. But, says Aaron Klein, "it's a big enigma. Was he involved in Munich, or wasn't he?"

A former head of Mossad, Efraim Halevy, insists that he was: "Salameh was one of the major figures involved in the Munich operation." So does David Kimche: "He was the mastermind." Yet the Palestinians continue to deny that Salameh had anything to do with it, and another high-ranking PLO official, Abu Daoud, has claimed responsibility. Could it be that, like the death of the Lillehammer surrogate, the killing of the man himself was a failure of intelligence?

Or was there another reason why Israel wanted Salameh dead? "He also had a role in the Palestinian diplomatic field," says Fatah's Imad Shakkour, "and in fabricating fruitful relations for the Palestinian cause with a number of parties in the world, including the United States. . . At that time specifically he was assassinated."

At the end of it all, did Wrath of God achieve anything more in the Middle East than a hardly visible blip in the rate of slaughter — a few more drops in the ocean of death? The Israelis claim 80% success. Of the 11 names on their hit list they crossed off nine, and by some accounts they also killed two of the three Munich terrorists released by the Germans (others suggest one died of a heart attack and the other is still alive). An innocent waiter, several policemen, a wife and a neighbour also lay dead. But did the operation do anything to deter international terrorism? Not even Mossad believes that. "Except in very unique cases," says Efraim Halevy, ". . . deterrence ultimately doesn't work. And there is no way of successfully deterring terrorists if they are bent on carrying out their acts, because their whole system of evaluating life is different to ours."

Ronen Bergman puts it bluntly: "Did it solve the Palestinian problem? No. Did it help to bring peace to the Middle East? No, and it created bloodshed from both sides in Europe. Tactically, it was successful. Strategically, it was a failure."

Munich: The Real Assassins, by Atlantic Productions, will be shown on Channel 4 at 10pm on January 26

[Mailman]

Was deterance the aim? I thought the sole goal was to eliminate those responsible for the attrocities in Munich...which was pretty much well achieved.

Mailman

[S'13]

People don't seem to understand the true impact the 1972 Munich Massacre had here in Israel.

27 years after the Shoah, Jews were once again being slaughtered in Europe and on German soil nontheless, for the world to see.

Israel wanted justice, and as it knew that it shouldn't expect anything from the Europeans, it did so on its own and with the suitable means.

[Mr. Nielsen]

Was deterance the aim? I thought the sole goal was to eliminate those responsible for the attrocities in Munich....

That's what Richard Girling questions in his article. Perhaps it was deterrence. Perhaps, Munich was just an excuse for Israel to kill moderate members of PLO in europe. Without, the sympathy generated by Munich, the fallout from such assasinations in europe might have been too much before.

Then again, we might be putting something into the matter which are not really there. The palestinians and israelis have been killing each other prior to Munich. And the real significance and meaning of modern terrorism might just be that it suddenly happended among people who were not involved in the original conflict.

[S'13]

That's what Richard Girling questions in his article. Perhaps it was deterrence. Perhaps, Munich was just an excuse for Israel to kill moderate members of PLO in europe. Without, the sympathy generated by Munich, the fallout from such assasinations in europe might have been too much before.

How "moderate" can be a person who is a member of a terrorist organization?

[Mr. Nielsen]

How "moderate" can be a person who is a member of a terrorist organization?

Like being one who would accept the state of israel and negotiate a solution, contrasting one who do not accept the state of israel and who wants to only fight.

All kinds of people can be moderate compared to others. Recently all kinds of people have been calling Sharon a moderate because he is less extremist than someothers.

[S'13]

Like being one who would accept the state of israel and negotiate a solution, contrasting one who do not accept the state of israel and who wants to only fight.

Can you point out any PLO figures who were targeted by the Mossad who fit that category? If not then please stop writing this rubbish.

[Kitsune]

27 years after the Shoah, Jews were once again being slaughtered in Europe and on German soil nontheless, for the world to see.

Even worse: in Bavaria...

[alexz]

Like being one who would accept the state of israel and negotiate a solution, contrasting one who do not accept the state of israel and who wants to only fight.

All kinds of people can be moderate compared to others. Recently all kinds of people have been calling Sharon a moderate because he is less extremist than someothers.

Did they accept the state of Isreal?

The maps of “Palestine” distributed by the Palestinian Authority and other PA elements.

Below are examples of maps depicting “Palestine” as a single entity without marking the “green line,” (as well as examples of omitting Israel and referring to “Palestine” as a single entity in Palestinian textbooks) which were circulated by various bodies.


A map of “Palestine” integrated into the Palestinian flag on a plaque awarded to Yihyeh (Hasan Abdallah) Yakhluf (1999), the deputy (head) of the Palestinian Culture Ministry, in appreciation of his “unique” support of the PA and UNRWA summer camps. The plaque was awarded to him by the “Jerusalem and Jericho areas summer-camps-and-schools supervising committee” (on the left). On the right hand side: the UNRWA logo.














Al-Tarbiyah al-Wataniyyah” (“National Education”) for the 3rd grade,
page 49, academic year 2002-2003


The Geography of Palestine” for 7th grade, academic year 2001-2002


http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...palmatoc1.html

[Macabi]

Want to see the movie so bad! Is it in the movies in the U.S. yet? If so did anyone here see it yet and comment?

[SPQR]

The movie was pretty bad, don't waste your money at the cinema, wait til it comes out on disc. Its more like a Wesley Snipes or Claude Van Dam movie, pure fantasy.

Ronen Bergman puts it bluntly: "Did it solve the Palestinian problem? No. Did it help to bring peace to the Middle East? No, and it created bloodshed from both sides in Europe. Tactically, it was successful. Strategically, it was a failure."

That sentence says it all... but says nothing. It didn't make a difference because Israel had focused only on a small group of terrorists that were directly or indirectly involved in one terrorist attack. The purpose was not to bring peace to the middle east, it was to bring justice to the families of the slain athletes. To make a difference, it has to be no-holds-barred war on the top leadership of the the terrorists, their sources of finance, and the infrastructure. The rest will wither on the vine. Of course you could just say strategy be damned and just kill terrorists for pure enjoyment of it.

[Omaha]

That's what Richard Girling questions in his article. Perhaps it was deterrence. Perhaps, Munich was just an excuse for Israel to kill moderate members of PLO in europe. Without, the sympathy generated by Munich, the fallout from such assasinations in europe might have been too much before.

Hahaha moderate leader of an organization designed to destroy Israel.

You sir are a grade a asshat.

Palestinian Liberation Organization. No moderates allowed.

[Pan_Grzegorz]

I've got a question. Some guy on the other forum tryes to convince me that Jews are some kind of super humans, won half of Nobels and have avg. IQ over 120. Is that true ?? What's average IQ among Jews, in Israel for example. I need sources for that fool.

[S'13]

I've got a question. Some guy on the other forum tryes to convince me that Jews are some kind of super humans, won half of Nobels and have avg. IQ over 120. Is that true ?? What's average IQ among Jews, in Israel for example. I need sources for that fool.

Super human?! Nah, but it is a fact that Jews constitute almost one-fifth of all Nobel laureates. This while Jews make up 0.2% percent of the world's population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._Prize_winners

In Israel we don't have any IQ statistics of the Jewish population, only of the general population (that is made up of over one million Arabs).