Original subtitles

I'm Jim McKay, speaking to you live at this moment from ABC headquarters.

The peace of what have been called "The Serene Olympics" was shattered

just before dawn this morning, when Arab terrorists,

armed with submachine guns,

went to the headquarters of the Israeli team.

This is building number 31.

And we're moving in now on the windows,

behind which, at this moment, eight or nine terrified,

living human beings are being held prisoner.

Black September is, that moment, the most dangerous,

the most virulent Palestinian terrorist organization.

The latest word we get from the airport is that,

"All hell has broken loose out there."

By midnight, it was clear that the operation failed,

and all the hostages are dead.

Golda Meir, prime minister,

this was, for her, one or more steps too far.

Golda said, "Send the boys."

The boys were a special commando of the Mossad.

The mission was called "God's Wrath,"

and, uh, it was intended to find and kill

the leaders of the Black September.

It's now the time to turn the terrorists

from hunter to hunted.

The Olympic Games in Munich in 1972,

for the German people, meant almost total rehabilitation.

The last Games that were held in Germany were in 1936,

and the man who opened the Olympic Games in Berlin

was none other than Adolf Hitler.

I proclaim the Games of Berlin,

celebrating the 11th Olympiad of the modern era,

to be open.

For the Israelis, there was a very, very major problem facing Israel,

should participate in Olympic Games on German territory?

The decision was yes.

We had a group of very good athletes who had dreamt of the day

they would compete at the Olympic Games.

We had the... the fastest runner in the western half of the planet,

and we expected her to... to win the Olympic medal.

They all came with enormous hopes.

The Germans saw the Munich Olympic 1972

as an antithesis to the 1936 Olympic Games

during the Nazi regime.

They wanted to present it the "Happy Olympic Games,"

so they didn't want, uh, any security guards

to be shown in the Olympic Village,

and there were hardly any security.

When the, uh, Israeli Embassy approached the German Olympic Committee

and asked them to provide protection for the Israeli athletes, they said,

"What are you talking about? It's an Olympic spirit here."

"Nothing is going to happen."

My name is Avraham Melamed.

I was a, uh, competitive swimmer, and at the time,

I was the, uh, the best representation of Israel in the swimming pool.

I awoke at around five o'clock, 5:15.

There were some noises from the neighboring apartment,

and I heard the noises, and it sounded like somebody

is, uh, moving a lot of furniture back and forth,

some yells and screams.

Then there were louder noises coming from the other apartment.

Sounds of submachine guns going off.

And then everything, uh, quieted down for me.

One of the sharpshooters, who resided in a top apartment,

came down and, uh, asked me, "Did you hear what happened?"

"Seems like Palestinians broke in, took hostages."

We didn't know what to do.

And we looked outside the window.

First, I saw Muni, uh, the wrestler, lying down dead on the sidewalk.

So, we realized it's... it's a serious business.

I decided for myself, "I don't want to be here."

So, I basically opened the windows and went out the back of the apartment.

As soon as I got out of the apartment,

I was tackled by some security guard from Germany and brought somewhere else.

At the beginning, the police did not understand what... what it's all about.

They could not believe that terrorists could penetrate into the Olympic Village.

But finally, after time passes, they realize that we are actually...

We have a situation of hostages in the hands of a group of terrorists.

This is an ITN newsflash from the Olympic Village in Munich,

where early this morning, armed Palestinian guerrillas

raided the sleeping quarters of the Israeli team.

The gunmen shot dead two Israelis

and are now holding 20 athletes and six officials as hostages.

The guerillas are demanding the release of 250 Arabs held prisoner in Israel,

and have set noon as the deadline for their release.

Negotiations are on with the German government.

I was in Jerusalem. Early morning, uh, came news on the radio,

and I rushed to the office of the prime minister.

The prime minister heard it from her military secretary

and also on news broadcasts.

And I, for one, felt this sense of, uh, helplessness, this sense of... of shame.

How could we reach such a situation

where the Palestinians were able to penetrate the Olympic Village

and, uh, hold Israeli hostages, such large numbers,

in front of, basically, the entire world watching?

It was a very shocking situation.

The idea began when the International Olympic Committee

refused to involve Palestine or the Palestinian team

in the Olympic competition,

and from here the idea began, "Why would they reject us?"

Because we were not considered as a state,

but we wanted the international public opinion to know about our cause.

Killing the Israelis was never the purpose.

There was the birth of a Palestinian revolutionary movement in 1948.

Those people who had been driven out of their homes

and who considered it a catastrophe...

as they say in their words, the "Nakba"... attributed it to Westerners in general

and the Jews in particular, who, in their eyes,

made Israel a colonial state,

which was necessary to fight against to reclaim their land,

which they considered to have been unfairly confiscated.

PLO, Palestine Liberation Organization,

taken over by Yasser Arafat,

basically stated that the Jews have no right to their own state.

The Jews are not a nation, they are a religion.

And in that capacity, they can live wherever they want,

but there is no right reason for the existence

of a separate, free, sovereign Jewish-Zionist entity called Israel.

Golda Meir's stand was very firm.

During her tenure as the prime minister,

Israel experienced quite a few terror incidents,

both on Israeli soil and also abroad.

And Golda decision was

never, never ever yield to terrorists' demands.

In a way, she was a little bit paranoid.

She always thought the Jews are hated.

She always thought that anti-Semitism is very strong everywhere.

Prime minister, she immediately called for a special government meeting,

and it was at 9:30 in the morning.

The decision at the time was,

Israel is not going to negotiate with a hostage-taking, uh, Palestinian.

In this particular case, it turned out to be Black September.

Black September was created, actually, by Yasser Arafat,

the head of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization,

and its military wing called the Fatah.

He created a top-secret, new terrorist group,

which was actually a kind of underground within an underground.

Black September was in memory of September 1970,

when King Hussein of Jordan,

whose kingdom was actually overrun

and almost governed by groups of armed Palestinians,

he unleashed his army and his artillery against the Palestinians.

That was quite a massacre of Palestinians.

Black September, it is a group of people from Al Fatah.

Yasser Arafat himself,

really, I don't know if he is backing Black September or not.

And, uh, these, uh, people or this group of people

is backed from some of Al Fatah leaders.

Which ones?

That's to say Abu Youssef, Abu Iyad.

Uh, I know that Abu Iyad planned for Munich.

And choosing the Olympics was a good choice, from their point of view,

because it was clear that, even then, 50 years ago,

hundreds of millions were mesmerized by this global event.

Continuous delegations go forward.

People here, waiting.

But unquestionably, the mood becoming more tense.

Having arrived on site,

I learned from the police that I was going to take command

for a planned attack

to free the Israeli hostages.

Told there are men with guns

beginning to train those guns on rooms where the two heads

were sticking out a moment ago, the Arab guerrilla lookouts.

This is happening now, if you can possibly believe that,

at the Games of the 20th Olympiad.

We took position on the roof of the respective premises,

and I waited on the radio

for the operation brief from the chief

with the codeword "sunshine"

and

the codeword did not come.

And in the meantime,

some smart television staff had taken position on the adjacent block,

filming down onto our roof.

Therefore, the terrorists saw

our position on the roof on television.

That was one of the reasons why it was aborted.

Then, all of a sudden, they said we should get off the roof,

and we would move to Fürstenfeldbruck.

There was an aircraft ready,

and the terrorists demanded

free leave and safe conduct.

The guerrillas are demanding to be allowed

to fly out of Germany, to an unnamed destination,

once their demands have been met.

Nearly 500 German security police have now sealed off the village

and are mounting heavy machine guns in the square.

They are keeping cameramen, reporters and spectators well away.

Willy Brandt was the prime minister, a great friend of Israel,

and everything Israel could do

was to ask the German government

to allow it to send the commandos or their specialists,

their experts, the Mossad agents, to try to save the, uh, hostages,

and, uh, the Germans very politely refused.

The only thing they accepted

was that the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, would be able to watch

the process of dissolution of the problem.

And the decision was made,

was that the head of Mossad, Zvi Zamir, would travel to, uh, Germany.

The Mossad full name is

the Special Institution for Special Duties.

That is the equivalent in America to the CIA.

At the time of Munich, he was appointed as head of the Mossad

by, uh, Prime Minister, uh, Golda Meir.

When Zvi Zamir arrived, the Germans showed him the plan,

how to rescue the hostages.

The plan was that helicopters will take both the hostages and the terrorists

to the airfield, where a Lufthansa jet was waiting for them to take them,

according to their demand, to Cairo with the hostages.

And they said when they arrive to Cairo safely,

they will free the hostages.

When they would go from the helicopters to check the jet,

snipers will shoot and kill them.

And there was also a commando waiting for them in the jet,

and will kill the others.

And this way, they will rescue the hostages.

Actually, Zamir thought it's a good plan.

The problem was not the plan.

The problem was execution of the plan.

The, uh, hostages were brought by bus

to a heliport close to the Olympic Village.

And from there, they flew in two helicopters

to the airport of Fürstenfeldbruck, close to Munich.

Zvi went up to the roof and watched everything happening from there.

He immediately realized that there was a problem...

things were not happening as planned.

The worst happened.

Leaders of the terrorists went up to the plane.

They found out it was a trap. It was not a real plane.

They were supposed to have boarded a German jetliner

for a flight to an Arab nation.

German government says it was convinced this meant

certain death for the Israelis, and the decision was made to try to either

disable or kill the guerrillas at the airport.

They admit that police sharpshooters opened fire first.

It was a panic. It was dark in the night. There was no light.

We had to stay under cover to not get shot by our own colleagues.

And then, suddenly, the helicopter was on fire.

The guerrillas not hit opened fire on the hostages.

The Palestinians threw some hand grenades inside the helicopters,

where the Israeli hostages were tied in the seats.

These people died, and they... and they burned.

Golda was in her house with few prominent ministers,

and they were getting contradicted information

about what's going on in München.

Around one o'clock the morning after,

an information came through that the operation was successful.

All the athletes were released and secured and safe,

and all the terrorists were killed.

And there was a sigh of relief in Golda's house

because it was a night of a very severe tension all along.

The reports that came out in the evening of September 5th,

from the German government and from German media outlets,

were very positive.

In fact, they reported that the rescue operation

has been successful and that all the hostages were safely released.

Then there was a phone call from Zvicka Zamir.

Came, I think, at 3:10 in the morning, in which he said,

"Golda, they're all dead. I saw them."

"No one has survived."

And then you can imagine

uh, the heartbreak that they all had when they just heard the news,

and the entire nation was in mourning.

You went from a euphoric moment of celebrating the release

to deep depression in a heartbeat.

So, for Germany, it was a disaster finally.

And they did not ask the Israelis for help because they wanted to do it themselves.

German politicians, they thought we are good enough to do it,

but we were not.

That's the problem.

Inside the airfield, the scene was described by one eyewitness as

"the most horrible thing I've ever seen."

It was a terrible tragedy,

and just try to imagine Zvi Zamir, the head of the Mossad, watching it

and realizing it can't succeed.

We were with our ears to the, uh, radio.

At a certain point in time,

they came out with an, uh, announcement.

My father used to say, "Our greatest hopes and worst fears are seldom realized."

Our worst fears have been realized tonight.

They have now said that there were 11 hostages.

Two were killed in their rooms this mo... yesterday morning.

Nine were killed at the airport tonight.

They're all gone.

I feel shivers now as I think about it.

But we were quiet for several minutes.

Every one of us with our own thoughts and afraid to say anything...

because nothing was appropriate to say.

I remember the, uh, photos and the television coverage

of the bringing of the... of the coffins out of the plane.

It was a shock to the whole, uh, public.

A huge frustration. "How the hell it could happen?"

And Golda Meir, making a speech, says, "For the second time,

Jews are being killed, massacred on German soil."

Members of the Knesset,

the duty to fight the war of anti-Israeli terrorism

is our natural duty.

The terrorist activity is continually evolving,

and we must prepare ourselves for this war

even more than we have been prepared so far.

Golda Meir called for revenge.

And, uh, I mean, not just her.

Uh, the... the whole cabinet asked for revenge.

Then, two men come see Golda.

And they come to Golda, and they said, "Listen."

"This operation was executed by Black September."

"We have to put an end to this organization."

Because they have already a bloody record, and they are going to continue.

If we can crush the head of the snake,

if we can kill the leaders of the organization,

we can destroy them completely, the Black September.

For that, we need to send

a group of our commandos out of the country,

to foreign countries where, uh, leaders of Black September

are preparing the next missions, and take care of them.

Golda Meir, during her tenure as the prime minister,

she never hesitated to approve preemptive or even retaliation attack

against terrorist targets on Arabs' land.

But she rejected very firmly any suggestion

that Israel should attack terrorist targets

on sovereign and friendly states, mainly in Europe.

The Munich massacre changed it all.

This was, for her, one or more steps too far.

She agreed with the Knesset member who suggested

that it's now the time to turn the terrorists from hunters to hunted.

But Golda emphasized

that we should do everything that possible in our capacity

to avoid hurting those who are not involved.

Israel is unique.

Israel developed an entire security apparatus

that is meant to punish people just for their motivation to inflict harm.

Israel is not the only country in the world that invented the...

We call it "targeted killings" or "interceptions of ticking bombs."

The United States has done it, and other countries as well.

So, the importance of what happened is that,

if Israel's security doctrine

is based on the need to protect, to prevent, and to deter,

the Israeli reaction to the Munich massacre

satisfies the third element.

Huge deterrent.

So, Golda Meir, she was very determined,

but she didn't want to... to be the only... the one who decided on her own.

So she took the Minister of, uh, Defense, Moshe Dayan,

and other two minister who were deeply involved in security issues,

and they created what called kind of an X Committee to...

to decide, to consider, based on recommendation of Mossad,

whom to target.

So, the day after the attacks,

the Prime Minister's Office decreed

the setting up of an operation of vengeance,

Operation Wrath of God, as it is called,

for which a specialized Mossad cell was created, known as Kidon,

which is an organization in charge of preparing

and carrying out targeted assassinations.

The basic principle was shoot and don't talk.

But, uh, at the time, you do talk to certain chosen people

who will spread the word around that, uh,

Israel was behind, uh, all these things.

Kidon was a subunit of the operational branch of Mossad.

Focus on this mission, they got the target,

and they prepared the operation, and executed them.

We, luckily enough, we had enough tough people to fill this, uh, job.

They made a list and said, "Okay." And they started to... to look for them.

Mike Harari was in charge of several operations of this commando.

He was the ultimate secret agent.

He was one of the founders of the Mossad.

The first one was in... in Rome.

Abdel Zwaiter.

He was a very gentle, very nice man.

A poet.

But behind this gentle appearance,

there was a very, very devious mind.

Operated and planned little missions against Israel.

Abdel Zwaiter goes home after dinner.

In the lobby, by the elevator...

...two guys of the Israeli team were waiting, and they shot him.

He was the first.

At that time, the center,

the advanced headquarters of the Mossad was in Paris.

So, Mike already, like many others, lived and operated from Paris.

Dr. Hamshari, who lived in Paris,

married to a French wife, with a French little daughter,

he was also a very... a very pleasant man.

A man of peace.

He had given interviews about his peaceful intentions.

There will never be such attacks against France

because of its political position.

Can you live in peace in France?

Are you afraid for your life?

For me, no, but I might not want to tempt fate.

And the Israelis reached the conclusion

that he was one of the leaders

of the, uh, Black September, uh, framework in Europe.

So, they had to find a way to kill Hamshari

at a time when his wife and child were not in the proximity.

Dr. Hamshari got a phone call from a woman called Patricia Roxburgh,

a photographer of Canadian origin living in Paris, and also a journalist.

And she had a very good cover.

Her real name was Sylvia Raphael.

Born in South Africa,

Sylvia Raphael was one of the great Israeli Amazons.

She was a volunteer for the Mossad. She calls, uh, Dr. Hamshari,

and she said that she wants to interview him.

He meets her in a café in Paris.

LE BARDINET BAR - TOBACCO

During that time, a couple of Mossad agents

penetrates into Hamshari's apartment

and plants a bomb under the seat of his telephone.

And the following day,

after his wife and child have left the apartment,

two people arrive, facing his building.

One of them has in his hand a remote control device.

Sylvia Raphael telephones Hamshari

and says, "Is this Dr. Hamshari?"

He says, "Yes."

Then he gives a sign to his colleague, who presses the button.

The bomb explodes

and wounds mortally Hamshari,

who dies in a French hospital.

Hamshari's number two.

When he was eliminated,

my colleagues were extremely upset and resented Mossad

for having come to settle scores

with someone whom we were not certain was an activist

in the streets of Paris, as any Middle Eastern thug did.

Two months after Munich,

some guys who were doing intelligence for Kidon came to me.

They brought an air photo of high-end residential buildings

in the center of Beirut and told me,

"We have a mission to neutralize a list of people."

"We are taking care of it."

Here in these two buildings in Verdun Street in Beirut,

there live three of the terrorists.

One is Abu Youssef Al-Najjar,

who's the main leader... operational leader of, uh, of Black September.

The other was Kamal Adwan, who was operational leader as well.

And the third was Kamal Nasser,

who was, uh, spokesman of, uh, PLO, of the terrorist organizations.

So he asked me,

"Do you think that you can plan an operation to, uh, kill them?"

I told him, "I... I think so. I... I think I can."

He asked, "What do you have in mind?"

We came with the missile boats to the shore of Beirut.

We were 15 guys, walking after midnight together.

It seems a little bit suspicious, so we decided to make it much more normal

by taking four of us, making them ladies.

We took, uh... put, uh, everything, the hair... the, uh...

the lipstick, the... the, uh, mascara, the blue onto the eyes.

We drove through the city.

We parked the car some 80 yards from the building, and we start to walk.

I was in the leading couple.

I put my, uh, head on the shoulder of a... a taller guy.

The officer was my boyfriend.

We reached the place.

The three squads that had to go to the apartments

went, uh, into the stairwell.

And I waited for them to report on the communication that they are there.

They all push at the same moment the explosive charges,

and we enter simultaneously.

The three terrorists killed.

Uh, one of them, when the squad entered into his room,

his wife was standing behind him.

He was shot, and his wife was killed as well.

And in another... in the other residential tower,

a woman who stood behind the door,

the neighboring door to the door that we opened,

was already killed.

A guy with a leather jacket and mustache, dark skin, came out.

Uh, he pulled a gun and start to cross the road toward us.

So, we came to clarify, "What... what's happened here?"

I murmured to the blonde, "There is no choice."

And I still remember the shock in his eyes

when he saw the two young ladies open their jackets,

pulling, uh, small machine guns, and, uh, submachine guns start to shoot.

So, basically, we lost surprise,

before all the, uh... all the squads reached the doors.

We, uh, took off from the street.

The whole shooting took place for some seven minutes.

And within 30 minutes after we landed, we were back into the sea,

mission accomplished.

Although each of us was a target,

there are priorities for the Israeli agencies and Mossad

so Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser or Youssef Al-Najjar...

this crew was

Mossad's priority.

So, Mossad assassinated them and killed them in 1973.

They focused on Ali Hassan Salameh.

Ali Hassan Salameh was an ordinary Palestinian citizen,

but he had his own narrative.

His father, Hassan Salameh,

was one of the Palestinian militants who were killed or martyred

during the Palestinian revolution

in the fight between the Zionist movement

and the Palestinian militants.

In this regard, the young Palestinian patriot joined Fatah movement

at an early stage when he finished his university studies in 1964.

He is one of Yasser Arafat's inner circle,

to whom he is linked both by affection and by blood ties.

Abu Hassan Salameh, he received what is known in Fatah

as a fundamental position called the Central Source.

The Central Source is the person who follows up on all cases

and operations against Mossad and against Israel.

He formed a kind of Arab international team

to follow up

and pursue all the Mossad members.

From that moment onwards, he became the first enemy of Mossad,

and Golda Meir named him a strange name,

and it is "The Red Prince."

She used to say that it means the murderer who cost us

a lot of Israeli Jewish blood.

So many Mossad people and informers and spotters

were looking after Ali Hassan Salameh.

Ali Hassan Salameh was seen all over.

He's in Geneva, but he's leaving.

He's going to the north, maybe to Denmark.

And there was another Lebanese informer, "He is traveling, uh, to Norway now."

They got other information that Salameh

is in this small town of Lillehammer.

When the Israeli arrived to Lillehammer, Mike Harari is there.

Zvi Zamir, the head of the Mossad, he is there.

There is also a man called Dan Arbel.

There are at least two women.

One is Sylvia Raphael. Of course, she is always there.

And one is a Swedish girl named Marianne Gladnikoff.

So, they separated.

"Maybe that's the place where we shall see Salameh."

They found Ali Hassan Salameh there,

uh, sitting in a... in a... in a coffee shop,

having a coffee and very relaxed, talking to others.

And then they watch him, and they see several things which were very strange.

First of all, the guy was going around in bicycle.

He was going out without any protection. Nobody kept him.

He was living in a kind of very poor apartment

in the outskirts of Lillehammer.

The Mossad had a photograph of Salameh which was very grainy.

Sylvia Raphael, she is very skeptical.

She says, "He doesn't seem to be the right man."

But Mike Harari, Zvi Zamir, the head of the commando,

who are already used to be right all the time,

they order to kill him.

In the evening, they see Salameh again,

with a pregnant woman, who go to a cinema.

CINEMA

And then they go out.

They follow them. They take a bus.

They follow them with a car when they get out of the bus.

They shoot Salameh dead, and they are very happy.

Great success. Good boys. Go home.

And the... the shooters immediately leave, and, uh, Harari and Zamir leave.

But this was not Ali Hassan Salameh.

They killed the wrong guy.

He was assassinated by the secret service, by Mossad.

EXECUTED

He had no ties with the Palestinians at all.

Golda said, "It's a war to protect Israeli lives, and in a war,

mistake can be... happen."

Killings of the heads of Black September

were an extremely successful mission.

But the only one who survived,

Ali Hassan Salameh.

Yasser Arafat assigned Ali Hassan Salameh

to establish this secret channel with the CIA.

The Mossad decide to send a woman.

"You must go to Beirut, and your mission will be...

to kill a man."