Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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31 May, three members of the JRA boarded Air France flight 132 from Paris to Tel Aviv during a stopover in Rome. The three men had no intention of commandeering the plane, because theirs was a suicide mission to massacre passengers in the arrival terminal at Ben Gurion International Airport. Shortly after arriving at 10:30 P.M., the three retrieved their baggage inside the terminal, drew automatic weapons and grenades from their bags, and opened fire indiscriminately. The Japanese killed 24 in the massacre, including 19 Puerto Rican Catholics on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and wounded more than seventy others in the rampage. Two of the attackers were killed, one when he crossed in front of his comrades' line of fire, a second when a grenade exploded in his hands. The third, Kozo Okamoto, was captured and imprisoned in Israel.18 Witnesses described the rampage: “all of a sudden I saw a tall man in a brown shirt pulling a machine gun and cocking it…. I heard bursts of fire that lasted a few minutes…. I saw people rolling, scattering away…. I saw two people limping through the exit doors.” Emergency personnel arrived to find a scene of carnage, shards of glass, and pools of blood. Shimon Peres, minister of transportation, arrived at Ben Gurion and gave the first briefing to the media: “I am sorry to say that the bloodbath was extremely terrible.” He vowed that Israel would “take every step to fight this new madness.” The PFLP viewed things differently. The PFLP immediately announced “its complete responsibility for the brave operation” and identified the fallen heroes as members of the Squad of the Martyr Patrick Arguello, a reference to the air pirate killed by Israeli security on the El Al flight during the Skyjack Sunday operation. The PFLP believed it had ample justification to describe the operation as brave and the fallen terrorists as martyrs. It timed the operation to coincide with the fifth anniversary of Israel's aggression in the June 1967 Six Day War, and claimed it was a reprisal for the Sayaret Matkal killing of Ali Taha during the takedown of the hijacked Sabena flight earlier in the month. The attack was “the revolutionary answer to the Israeli massacre performed in cold blood…a tribute to the blood of two heroes who fell as a result of a cheap trick.”19
Israeli authorities interrogated Kozo Okamoto the terrorist who survived the attack. The twenty-four-year-old gave critical details of the planning of the attack and the operational alliance between the JRA and the PFLP. The Lod massacre was to have been a suicide operation, and Okamoto pleaded with the Israelis to permit him to take his own life. But Okamoto would live a long life. He languished in an Israeli prison for twelve years, but he was not forsaken. He went free in 1985 as a result of a prisoner exchange between Israel and the PFLP and disappeared into Lebanon. Japanese authorities never abandoned efforts to bring him to justice and in 2000 persuaded their Lebanese counterparts to arrest him and three other JRA militants. The Lebanese extradited three, but Okamoto escaped prosecution. News of his arrest sparked protests by Lebanese Muslims, who regarded him as a hero for his actions at Lod, and the Lebanese government granted him asylum.20
The Lod massacre revealed the power of ideology to incite to murder. The Japanese militants killed without regard to the innocence of their victims in the name of a struggle that was not their own. Israelis understood that hatred of the Jewish state could justify indiscriminate murder of Jews in the minds of Palestinian terrorists. But the Japanese had no personal connection to Palestine. Their motivation for undertaking a suicide operation for the PFLP was a vague ideological notion that the liberation of Palestine would somehow promote a global revolution. European terrorists who would soon enlist in the PFLP as mercenaries shared this view without ever articulating how indiscriminate slaughter could lead to a more just revolutionary world order.
The Israelis were swift to exact vengeance. On 8 July, the Mossad assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, the PFLP spokesperson in Beirut, with a car bomb. It was Kanafani who, beginning with the July 1968 press conference during the El Al hijacking in Algiers, justified the most unjustifiable acts of violence as the voice of the PFLP. The Mossad must have taken great satisfaction at his death, even though in killing him the Mossad also killed his seventeen-year-old niece. Over the next few weeks, Mossad letter bombs maimed the director of a PLO research center and editor of a PFLP newspaper.21 Kanafani's assassination was a prelude to a Mossad assassination campaign sanctioned by the Israeli cabinet at the end of the year in reaction to Black September's next operation—in Munich.
The Games of Peace and Joy
After Lod, Black September became the most clear and present danger. The Sabena hijacking in March went badly, but by the summer of 1972 Black September was preparing for its most infamous operation “to affirm the existence of the Palestinian people,” as Abu Iyad explained it, “by taking advantage of the extraordinary concentration of mass media.”22 In 1972 there was only one event that could demand extraordinary media coverage: the Games of the XX Olympiad in Munich.
The West German government welcomed the summer Olympics as an historic opportunity to erase the ignominious memories of Hitler's 1936 Berlin games. Chancellor Willy Brandt hoped to prove that West Germany was a different state. The venue for the games held great significance for the twenty-one-member Israeli delegation as well. Because Germany under Nazi rule was the epicenter of the Holocaust, by participating in the games the Israeli Olympians would prove the Jewish nation would forever survive. But for the Palestinians the games were something else entirely. If the West believed the creation of a Jewish state somehow assuaged European guilt, the Palestinians demanded the world know that the birth of Israel was their collective Catastrophe by mounting an attack during a sporting festival that in ancient times prompted warring city-states to observe a temporary truce.
In mid-July 1972 Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud—the core leadership of Black September—rendezvoused at a café in Rome. The International Olympics Committee had just announced its rejection of a Palestinian petition to send a Palestinian team to compete in the Games. Abu Iyad was incensed because, he wrote later, it seemed to confirm the international community's belief that Palestinians “didn't deserve to exist.”23 Two days after their meeting in the Italian capital, Abu Daoud flew to Munich to see the Olympic Village for himself.24 Operation Iqrit and Biri'm—an allusion to Palestinian villages outside Jerusalem cleansed by the Israelis in 1948—was in motion.25
The Games of the XX Olympiad—the Games of Peace and Joy—were set to begin on 26 August. As the world's finest athletes were preparing for competition around the globe, a contingent of Palestinians was training for hand-to-hand combat in a Libyan camp for a mission to infiltrate the Olympic Village and take Israeli Olympians hostage. Yasser Arafat certainly knew of the operation, but he prudently left the operational details to Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, who selected two men—known to the world only as Issa and Tony—to lead the assault. On 7 August, Abu Daoud returned to Munich with Tony to reconnoiter the Olympic Village for a second time. On 24 August Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud rendezvoused again in Frankfurt. Iyad and a female companion flew in from Paris carrying weapons for the assault—Kalashnikovs and grenades—in their luggage. A West German customs official inspected one bag but found only women's lingerie and waved the couple through. Over the next few days, Abu Daoud transported the weapons from Frankfurt to Munich by train and concealed them in lockers in the terminal building.
The failure of West German—and U. S. and European—intelligence agencies was catastrophic. Abu Iyad and Abu Daoud, senior members of Fatah and Black September, managed to move around European capitals without detection. Now they were in West Germany, a country that had already had brushes with Palestinian terror. PFLP terrorists attacked Israelis on West German soil in Munich in February 1970, hurling grenades at the El Al ticket counter. Black September sabotaged a West German electrical plant in February 1971, and later that month the PFLP hijacked a Lufthansa flight to Yemen. After the Lufthansa incident, West German authorities complained about the Yemeni leniency because some of the terrorists were known to the West Germans. Yet inexplicably, West German authorities, who should also have known about Abu Iyad, failed to detect him at the airport with weapons of war. And the West Germans had their own indigenous terrorism. The German Red Army Faction and the Revolutionary Cells, which were already planting bombs in West German cities by the time RAF leader Andreas Baader made contact with the PFLP in February 1972, only seven months before the West Germans would welcome the world to a restored West Germany. In fact, the West Germans had Baader in custody when the games began and after the Palestinians seized the Israeli athletes they included