Middle Eastern Terrorism. Mark Ensalaco
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of success against fatigued Palestinians if the crisis had dragged on for days, but the Palestinians, aware of the fate of the Black September hijackers of the Sabena flight in May, did not commit the failure of permitting the West Germans or the Israelis to wear them down. The West German refusal to permit Israel's Sayaret Matkal to take charge of the rescue, or even to give tactical advice, was about to have terrible consequences. And in an incredible intelligence failure, the West Germans deployed only five snipers. Authorities in the Olympic Village never conveyed an accurate count of the Palestinians to the police who were assembling to ambush them.
The helicopters arrived just after 10:30 P.M. Most of the terrorists stepped off, exposing themselves to snipers concealed on the roof of the small control tower building directly in front of them. Issa and another terrorist walked across the tarmac to inspect the jet awaiting them with engines revving. But when they boarded it they found no crew and sensed a trap. West German police, who were to have overpowered the men, abandoned their positions only minutes before the helicopters put down. The rescue failed then and there. As the Palestinians ran back to the helicopters shouting over the roar of the engines, the West Germans opened fire. But the snipers' aim was not true. One terrorist was killed in the first volley of shots, another wounded. But the others took cover beneath the helicopters and returned fire. The nine Israelis bound together inside the helicopters were defenseless as bullets ricocheted off the tarmac. The firefight at Fürstenfeldbruck lasted more than an hour. It ended in a massacre. As the West Germans brought up armored vehicles in support of the snipers, the Palestinians acted on their orders to defend themselves. One Palestinian fired at point-blank range into one helicopter, killing four of the Jewish athletes, another threw a grenade into the second helicopter killing the other five. When it was over, nine Israelis, five Palestinians, and a West German policeman were dead.
The carnage on the tarmac at Fürstenfeldbruck was not the end of the incident for either the Palestinians or the Israelis. Black September felt duty-bound to liberate the three imprisoned survivors of Operation Iqrit and Biri'm. It took them less than two months to force the West Germans to free them. On 29 October, Black September terrorists seized control of a Lufthansa flight out of Beirut for Munich and diverted it to Damascus. On the ground in the Syrian capital the hijackers threatened to blow up the plane and the passengers unless the German chancellor released fedayeen incarcerated in West Germany. Willy Brandt complied, and the survivors of the firefight in Munich went free.28 It was the end of a bad run for West German counterterrorism. The authorities failed to intercept the terrorists who attacked the Olympics, killed the Israeli hostages trying to save them, and now submitted to demands for the release of terrorists from their jurisdiction.
Committee X
Judaism teaches that anyone who saves a life saves the world; it also teaches an eye for an eye. Golda Meir resolved to be true to the ancient tradition. In the aftermath of the atrocity in West Germany, Golda Meir convened a meeting of her senior national security and counterterrorism advisors. At their urging, Meir resolved to hunt down the leadership of Black September. This was the origin of the Mossad Operation Wrath of God. Even for a state at war with implacable adversaries, the decision to sanction assassination crossed an invisible line into morally ambiguous territory. Plausible deniability became critical for political as well as the obvious operational reasons. Operation Wrath of God became a closely guarded secret of an ad hoc Committee X composed of the highest authorities of the Jewish state.29 Committee X sent covert teams of assassins across the Middle East and Europe to hunt down Black September terrorists. Without making the error of moral equivalence, the assassination teams were not unlike Black September. If the Palestinians adopted the name Black September to obscure the connections between its actions and the PLO leadership, the assassination teams attempted to distance themselves from the Mossad. The assassination teams led by the shadowy “Mike”—Mike Harari, who decades later became involved with Panamanian dictator Manual Noriega—and “Avner” went so far as to resign their commissions in the Mossad to create the conditions for plausible deniability in the argot of the intelligence community.
In fact, Committee X only decided to intensify and broaden a campaign of selective assassinations the Israeli government had begun years earlier. In July, before Munich, the Mossad assassinated Ghassan Kanafani and maimed lesser-known PLO figures with letter bombs; two years before that, in July 1970, the Mossad nearly assassinated Wadi Haddad in his Beirut apartment. Assassination was nothing new. The national clamor to avenge the Israeli Olympians only provided Israel more justification for reprisal killings or preemptive strikes to smite its terrorist enemies. Not all those marked for death belonged to Black September; PFLP cadres were hunted down and killed as well. And, the assassinations Committee X sanctioned served a broader strategic purpose. Not all those killed were terrorists; some were PLO moderates, who were killed at a moment when Israel had reasons to fear Arafat's tilt toward moderation.
The three survivors of Black September's Munich operation figured prominently on the Mossad hit list, but the chieftains of Black September—Abu Iyad, Mohammed Najjar, Abu Daoud, and Ali Hassan Salameh—were the' principal targets. The Israelis never managed to kill Abu Iyad; he would be killed by a dissident Palestinian he had recruited into Fatah; Sayaret Matkal, Israeli special forces, killed Najjar in Beirut in 1973; the Mossad seriously wounded Abu Daoud in 1981, but he survived and, a decade after the assassination attempt, voted as a member of the Palestinian National Council to rescind the clause in the PLO charter calling for the destruction of Israel.30 Ali Hassan Salameh, whom the Israelis called the Red Prince, frustrated the Israeli assassination squads until 1979; in fact, Israeli intelligence committed one of its most damaging blunders in 1974 when it killed a man it mistook for the Red Prince in Norway. Committee X also marked Wadi Haddad, the “Master” of PFLP operations, for death. The Israelis, who attempted to assassinate him as early as 1970, never managed to kill him; he died of cancer in 1978. Mohammed Boudia was the chief of PFLP operations in Europe and superior to the infamous Carlos the Jackal; the Israelis planted the bomb that killed him in his car in Paris in June 1973. Basil al-Kubaisi managed logistics for the PFLP; the Israelis killed him in Paris in April 1973.
Committee X's assassination squads struck within weeks of Munich, killing men who did not suspect the Mossad was hunting them. On 16 October 1972, the Israelis tracked Wael Zwaiter to Rome and shot him to death in the lobby of his apartment building. On 8 December, a Mossad assassination squad killed Mahmoud Hamshari in Paris. This time the assassination was more imaginative. Hamshari's killers placed a bomb under his telephone table and detonated it when he identified himself to a caller posing as a journalist interested in interviewing him. In January 1973, the Mossad killed Hussein Abad al-Chir in Cyprus by detonating a bomb placed under his bed. None of these men were directly involved in the Munich atrocity; indeed, there are doubts about their involvement in Black September. The Israelis had reason to believe that Zwaiter, PLO representative in Rome, had been involved in the El Al hijacking in July 1968. Hamshari was an intellectual, not a terrorist operative, but the Mossad believed he had had a hand in the Munich operation; the Israelis were certain al-Chir was the PLO contact with the Soviet KGB.31 These were only the first in a series of assassinations—and counter-assassinations—in a dirty war that would continue through 1973 and into 1974.
At the end of the year, Black September mounted its second major operation, on the other side of the world from the first. On 28 December, four Palestinian terrorists raided the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok.32 They seized six Israeli diplomats, among them the ambassador to neighboring Cambodia, who happened to be visiting. They issued the usual demands: the release of 36 imprisoned comrades. The terrorists' sense of solidarity was inclusive: the name of Kozo Okamoto, the Japanese Red Army survivor of the Lod massacre, figured on the list. The Munich incident was still vivid in the memories of the Israeli and Thai governments. Golda Meir, whose intelligence agency was just beginning to hunt down those responsible for Munich, reasserted the Israeli government's policy of non-negotiation. The government of Thailand, embarrassed by the breach of security, made a daunting show of force by encircling the embassy with security forces. As important as the Israeli and Thai reaction was that of Egypt. President Sadat had refused to become embroiled in the Munich incident. His refusal to grant the Black September commandos safe passage to Cairo not only contributed to the tragedy at Fürstenfeldbruck, but damaged his diplomacy. By the end of 1972, Sadat was interested in gaining support for a negotiated