The Olympic Games attacks  

During the 1972 Summer Olympics Games held in Munich, West Germany, eleven Israeli Olympic team members were taken  hostage and eventually killed, along with a German police officer, by the Palestinian terrorist group called the Black September.

The attack was motivated by secular nationalism, with the commander of the terrorist group, Luttif Afif, having been born to Jewish and Christian parents. The German neo-Nazis gave the attackers logistical assistance.

At 4:30 am local time on the 5^th of  September, as the athletes slept, eight tracksuit-clad members of the  Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, carrying duffel bags loaded with AKM assault rifles, Tokarev pistols, and grenades, scaled a 2-metre (6 ¹⁄₂ ft) chain-link fence with the assistance of unsuspecting athletes who were also sneaking into the Olympic Village after a night in the city.  The athletes were originally identified as Americans, but were claimed to be Canadians decades later.

Once inside, the Black September members used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at Connollystraße 31. Yossef Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, was awakened by a faint scratching noise at the door of Apartment 1, which housed the Israeli coaches and officials. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted a warning to his sleeping roommates and threw his 135 kg (300 lbs) weight against the door in a futile attempt to stop the intruders from forcing their way in. Gutfreund's actions gave his roommate, weightlifting coach, Tuvia Sokolovsky, enough time to smash a window and escape. Wrestling coach, Moshe Weinberg fought the intruders, who shot him through his cheek and then forced him to help them find more hostages.

Leading the intruders past Apartment 2, Weinberg lied by telling them that the residents of the apartment were not Israelis. Instead, Weinberg led them to Apartment 3. It was  there, hat the gunmen corralled six wrestlers and weightlifters as additional hostages. It is possible that Weinberg had hoped that the stronger men would have a better chance of fighting off the attackers than those in Apartment 2, unfortunately.  They were all surprised in their sleep.

As the athletes from Apartment 3 were marched back to the coaches' apartment, the wounded Weinberg again attacked the gunmen, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape via the underground parking garage.  Weinberg knocked one of the intruders unconscious and slashed at another with a fruit knife but failed to draw blood before being tortured and shot to death.

Weightlifter Yossef Romano, a veteran of the Six-Day War, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being shot and killed. In its publication of December 1, 2015, the New York Times reported that Romano was castrated while he was still alive after he was shot while the other hostages were forced to look on.

The gunmen were left with nine hostages. They were, in addition to Gutfreund, sharpshooting coach Kehat Shorr, track and field coach  Amitzur Shapira, fencing master Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer, wrestlers  Eliezer Halfin  and Mark Slavin and weightlifters David Berger and Ze'ev Friedman.

Berger was an expatriate American with dual citizenship.  Slavin, at age 18 the youngest of the hostages and had only arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union four months before the Olympic Games began. Gutfreund, physically the largest of the hostages, was bound to a chair (Groussard describes himself as being tied up like a mummy) The rest of the men were lined up four apiece on the two beds in Springer and Shapira's room, and bound at the wrists and ankles and then to each other. Romano's dead bullet-riddled corpse was left at his bound comrades' feet as a warning. Several of the hostages were beaten during the stand-off, with some suffering broken bones as a result.

Of the other members of Israel's team, racewalker, Shaul Ladany had been jolted awake in Apartment 2 by Gutfreund's screams. He jumped from the second-story balcony of his room and fled to the American dormitory, awakening U.S. track coach Bill Bowerman and informing him of the attack.

Ladany, a survivor of the Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was the first person to spread the alert as to the attack. The other four residents of Apartment 2 (sharpshooters Henry Hershkowitz and Zelig Shtroch, and fencers Dan Alon and Yehuda Weisenstein), plus chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin and the two team doctors, managed to hide and later fled the besieged building. The two female members of Israel's Olympic team, sprinter and hurdler Esther Shahamorov and swimmer Shlomit Nir, were housed in a separate part of the Olympic Village. Three more members of Israel's Olympic team, two sailors and their manager, were housed in Kiel, 900 kilometres (600 mi) from Munich.

The attackers were subsequently reported to be part of the Palestinian  terrorists  from refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They were identified as  Luttif Afif  (using the codename Issa), the leader (three of Issa's brothers were also reportedly members of Black September, two of them in Israeli jails), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal ("Tony"), and junior members.  Afif Ahmed Hamid ("Paolo"), Khalid Jawad ("Salah"), Ahmed Chic Thaa ("Abu Halla"), Mohammed Safady ("Badran), Adnan Al-Gashey  (Denawi) and Al-Gashey's cousin, Jamal Al-Gashey (Samir).

According to author Simon Reeve, Afif (the son of a Jewish mother and Christian father), Nazzal, and one of their confederates, had all worked in various capacities in the Olympic Village, and had spent a couple of weeks scouting out their potential target. A member of the Uruguayan Olympic delegation, which shared housing with the Israelis, claimed that he found Nazzal actually inside 31 Connollystraße less than 24 hours before the attack, but since he was recognized as a worker in the Village, nothing was thought of it at the time. The other members of the group entered Munich via train and plane in the days before the attack. All of the members of the Uruguay and Hong Kong Olympic teams, which also shared the building with the Israelis, were released unharmed during the crisis.

The hostage-takers demanded the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs jailed in Israel, along with two German insurgents held by the German penitentiary system, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who were founders of the German Red Army Faction. The hostage-takers threw the body of Weinberg out the front door of the residence to demonstrate their resolve. Israel's response was immediate and absolute: there would be no negotiation. Israel's official policy at the time was to refuse to negotiate with terrorists under any circumstances, as according to the Israeli government such negotiations would give an incentive to future attacks by terrorists.  

It has been claimed that the German authorities, under the leadership of Chancellor Willy Brandt  and Minister for the Interior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, that the had rejected Israel's offer to send an Israeli special forces unit to Germany. The Bavarian interior minister Bruno Merk, who headed the crisis centre jointly with Genscher and Munich's police chief Manfred Schreiber, denies that such an Israeli offer ever even existed. I find that hard to believe. The Israelis would be more that happy to send that top fighting force to Munich.

According to journalist John K. Cooley, the hostage situation presented an extremely difficult political situation for the Germans because the hostages were Jewish. Cooley reported that the Germans offered the Palestinians an unlimited amount of money for the release of the athletes, as well as the substitution by high-ranking Germans to take the place of the hostages. However, the kidnappers refused both offers.

Munich police chief, Manfred Schreiber, and Bruno Merk, interior minister of Bavaria, negotiated directly with the kidnappers, repeating the offer of an unlimited amount of money. According to Cooley, the reply was that "Money means nothing to us; our lives mean nothing to us."

Magdi Gohary and Mohammad Khadif, both Egyptian advisers to the Arab League, and A.D. Touny, an Egyptian member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) also helped try to win concessions from the kidnappers, but to no avail. However, the negotiators apparently were able to convince the terrorists that their demands were being considered, as Issa granted a total of five deadline extensions.

Elsewhere in the village, athletes carried on as normal, seemingly oblivious of the events unfolding nearby. The Games continued until mounting pressure on the IOC forced a suspension some 12 hours after the first athlete had been murdered. United States marathon runner Frank Shorter, observing the unfolding events from the balcony of his nearby lodging, was quoted as saying, "Imagine those poor guys over there. Every five minutes a psycho with a machine gun says, 'Let's kill 'em now,' and someone else says, 'No, let's wait a while.' How long could you stand that?

At 4:30 pm, a squad of 38 German police was dispatched to the Olympic Village. Dressed in Olympic sweatsuits (some also wearing Stahlhelme (1918 steel helmets) and carrying Walther MP sub-machine guns), they were members of the German border-police, although according to former Munich policeman Heinz Hohensinn they were regular Munich police officers, with no experience in combat or hostage rescue. Their plan was to crawl down from the ventilation shafts and kill the terrorists. The police took up positions awaiting the code word Sunshine, which upon hearing, they were to begin their assault.

In the meantime, camera crews filmed the actions of the officers from the German apartments, and broadcast the images live on television. Thus, the terrorists were able to watch the police prepare to attack. Footage shows one of the kidnappers peering from the balcony door while one of the police officers stood on the roof less than 20 ft (6 m) from him. In the end, after "Issa" threatened to kill two of the hostages, the police retreated from the premises. hat isn’t the first time that television crews have filmed police preparing for attacks against criminals. The German authorities should have ordered the TV crews out of the immediate area of the attack by the police.

At one point during the crisis, the negotiators demanded direct contact with the hostages to satisfy themselves that the Israelis were still alive. Fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who spoke fluent German, and shooting coach Kehat Shorr, the senior member of the Israeli delegation, had a brief conversation with German officials while standing at the second-floor window of the besieged building, with two kidnappers holding guns on them. When Spitzer attempted to answer a question, he was clubbed with the butt of an AK-47 in full view of international television cameras and pulled away from the window. A few minutes later, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Walter Tröger, the mayor of the Olympic Village, were briefly allowed into the apartments to speak with the hostages. Tröger spoke of being very moved by the dignity with which the Israelis held themselves, and that they seemed resigned to their fate.

Tröger noticed that several of the hostages, especially Gutfreund, showed signs of having suffered physical abuse at the hands of the kidnappers, and that David Berger had been shot in his left shoulder. While being debriefed by the crisis team, Genscher and Tröger told them that they had seen "four or five" attackers inside the apartment. Fatefully, these numbers of attackers were accepted as definitive. While Genscher and Tröger were talking with the hostages, Kehat Shorr had told the Germans that the Israelis would not object to being flown to an Arab country, provided that strict guarantees for their safety were made by the Germans and whichever nation they landed in. At 6 pm Munich time, the Palestinian kidnapers issued a new dictate, demanding transportation to Cairo.

TheGerman  authorities feigned agreement to the Cairo demand (although Egyptian Prime Minister Aziz Sedki had already told the German authorities that the Egyptians did not wish to become involved in the hostage crisis).

Two Bell UH-1 military helicopters were to transport the terrorists and hostages to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck, a NATO airbase. Initially, the perpetrators' plan was to go to Riem, which was the international airport near Munich at the time, but the negotiators convinced them that Fürstenfeldbruck would be more practical. The authorities, who preceded the Black Septemberists and hostages in a third helicopter, had an ulterior motive: they planned an armed assault at the airport.

Realizing that the Palestinians and Israelis had to walk 200 metres through the underground garages to reach the helicopters, the German police saw another opportunity to ambush the perpetrators, and placed sharpshooters there. But Issa insisted on checking the route first. He and some other Palestinians walked pointing their AK-47s at Schreiber, Tröger and Genscher. At that time, the gunmen of the police were lying behind cars in the side streets, and when the kidnappers approached, the police crawled away, making noise in the process. Thus the terrorists were immediately alerted of the dangerous presence, and they decided to use a bus instead of walking. The bus arrived at 10:00 pm and drove the contingent to the helicopters. Issa had checked them with a flashlight before boarding the bus in groups.

Five German policemen were deployed around the airport in sniper roles—three on the roof of the control tower, one hidden behind a service truck and one behind a small signal tower at ground level. However, none of them had any special sniper training, nor any special weapon (being equipped with the H&K G3, the ordinary battle rifle of the German Armed Forces without optics or night vision devices). The soldiers were selected because they shot competitively on weekends. During a subsequent German investigation, an officer identified as "Sniper No. 2" stated: "I am of the opinion that I am not a sharpshooter.”

The members of the crisis team—Schreiber, Genscher, Merk and Schreiber's deputy Georg Wolf—supervised and observed the attempted rescue from the airport control tower. Cooley, Reeve and Groussard all place Mossad chief, Zvi Zamir and Victor Cohen, one of Zamir's senior assistants, at the scene as well, but as observers only. Zamir has stated repeatedly in interviews over the years that he was never consulted by the Germans at any time during the rescue attempt and thought that his presence actually made the Germans uncomfortable. The German authorities were amateurs at fighting terrorists and should have asked the Israelis to advise them.

A Boeing 727 jet was positioned on the tarmac with sixteen German police inside dressed as flight crew. It was agreed that Issa and Tony would inspect the plane. The plan was that the Germans would overpower them as they boarded, giving the snipers a chance to kill the remaining terrorists at the helicopters. These were believed to number no more than two or three, according to what Genscher and Tröger had seen inside 31 Connollystraße. However, during the transfer from the bus to the helicopters, the crisis team discovered that there were actually eight of them.

At the last minute, as the helicopters were arriving at Fürstenfeldbruck, the German police aboard the airplane voted to abandon their mission, without consulting the central command. This left only the five sharpshooters to try to overpower a larger and more heavily armed group. At that point, Colonel Ulrich Wegener, Genscher's senior aide and later the founder of the elite German counter-terrorist unit GSG 9, said, “I'm sure this will blow the whole affair.” That was an understatement if there ever was one.

The helicopters landed at the airport just after 10:30 pm and the four pilots and six of the kidnappers emerged. While four of the Black September members held the pilots at gunpoint (breaking an earlier promise that they would not take any Germans hostage), Issa and Tony walked over to inspect the jet, only to find it empty. Realizing they had been lured into a trap, they sprinted back toward the helicopters. As they ran past the control tower, Sniper 3 took one last opportunity to eliminate Issa, which would have left the group leaderless. However, due to the poor lighting, he struggled to see his target and missed Issa and instead hitting Tony (he other kidnapper)  in the thigh instead. Meanwhile, the German authorities gave the order for snipers positioned nearby to open fire, which occurred around 11:00 pm.  

In the ensuing chaos, Ahmed Chic Thaa and Afif Ahmed Hamid, the two kidnappers holding the helicopter pilots, were killed while the remaining gunmen—some possibly already wounded—scrambled to safety, returning fire from behind and beneath the helicopters, out of the snipers' line of sight, shooting out many of the airport lights. A German policeman in the control tower, Anton Fliegerbauer, was killed by the gunfire. The helicopter pilots fled. The hostages, tied up inside the craft, could not flee. During the gun battle, the hostages secretly worked on loosening their bonds and teeth marks were found on some of the ropes after the gunfire had ended.

The Germans had not arranged for armored personnel carriers ahead of time and only at this point were they called in to break the deadlock. Since the roads to the airport had not been cleared, the carriers became stuck in traffic and finally arrived around midnight. With their appearance, the kidnappers felt the shift in the status quo, and possibly panicked at the thought of the failure of their operation.

At four minutes past midnight of September 6^th, one of terrorists  (who was likely Issa) turned on the hostages in the eastern helicopter and fired at them with a Kalashnikov assault rifle from point-blank range. Springer, Halfin and Friedman were killed instantly; Berger, shot twice in the leg, is believed to have survived the initial onslaught (as his autopsy later found that he had died of smoke inhalation). The attacker then pulled the pin on a hand grenade and tossed it into the cockpit; the ensuing explosion destroyed the helicopter and incinerated all of the bound Israelis inside. 

Issa then dashed across the tarmac and began firing at the police, who killed him with return fire. Another, Khalid Jawad, attempted to escape and was gunned down by one of the snipers.

What happened to the remaining hostages is still a matter of dispute. A German police investigation indicated that one of their snipers and a few of the hostages may have been shot inadvertently by the police. However, according to a  Time Magazine reconstruction of the long-suppressed Bavarian prosecutor's report, indicates that a third kidnapper, Adnan Al-Gashey stood at the door of the western helicopter and raked the remaining five hostages with machine gun fire. Gutfreund, Shorr, Slavin, Spitzer and Shapira were shot an average of four times each by this terrorist.

Of the four hostages in the eastern helicopter, only Ze'ev Friedman's body was relatively intact; he had been blown clear of the helicopter by the explosion. In some cases, the exact cause of death for the hostages in the eastern helicopter was difficult to establish because the rest of the corpses were burned almost beyond recognition in the explosion and subsequent fire. Three of the remaining terrorists lay on the ground, one of them feigning death, and were captured by police. Jamal Al-Gashey had been shot through his right wrist and Mohammed Safady had sustained a flesh wound to his leg. Adnan Al-Gashey had escaped injury completely. Tony escaped the scene, but was tracked down with police dogs 40 minutes later in an airbase parking lot. Cornered and bombarded with tear gas, he was shot dead after a brief gunfight. By around 1:30 am on September 6,  the battle was over.

Initial news reports, published all over the world, indicated that all the hostages were alive, and that all the attackers had been killed. Talk about fake news. Only later did a representative for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggest that "initial reports were overly optimistic." Jim McKay, who was covering the Olympics that year for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), had taken on the job of reporting the events as Roone Arledge fed them into his earpiece. At 3:24 am, McKay received the official confirmation of what had really happened in Munich. 

In his next announcement, he said, “We just got the final word.  When I was a kid, my father used to say that our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They've now said that there were eleven hostages. Two were killed in their rooms yesterday morning and nine were killed at the airport tonight. They're all gone. “

Several sources listed Ladany as having been killed. He wasn’t killed. He   later  recalled; The impact did not hit me at the time, when we were in Munich. It was when we arrived back in Israel. At the airport in Lod there was a huge crowd—maybe two hundred thousand, people—and each one of us, the survivors, stood by one of the coffins on the runway. Some friends came up to me and tried to kiss me and hug me as if I was almost a ghost that came back alive. It was then that I really grasped what had happened and the emotion hit me.” unquote

The shootout on the tarmac of the airport in Munich with the well-trained Black September members showed an egregious lack of preparation on the part of the German authorities. They were not prepared to deal with this sort of situation. This costly lesson led directly to the founding, less than two months later, of the new police counter-terrorism branch GSG 9.

The German authorities made a number of mistakes in that Munich fiasco. First, because of restrictions in the post-war West German constitution, the army could not legally participate in the attempted rescue, as the German armed forces were not allowed to operate inside Germany during peacetime. The responsibility was left entirely to the untrained authorities of the Munich police and the Bavarian authorities who royally screwed up right from the beginning of the attack against the Israeli Olympians. It was no different than asking grade one students to stop grade ten students from bullying them. It was akin to the well trained terrorists saying to the untrained police officers, “Get away you snotty silly children before we kick the shit out of you.”

It was known a half-hour before the hostages and kidnappers had even arrived at Fürstenfeldbruck that the number of the latter was larger than first believed. Despite this new information, Schreiber decided to continue with the rescue operation as originally planned despite the fact that the new information could not reach the snipers since they had no radios with them.

It is a basic tenet of sniping operations that there are enough snipers (at least two for each known target, or in this case a minimum of ten) deployed to neutralize as many of the attackers as possible with the first volley of shots.

The 2006 National Geographic Channel's  story Seconds From  Disaster profile on the massacre stated that the helicopters were supposed to land sideways and to the west of the control tower—a maneuver which would have allowed the snipers clear shots into them as the kidnappers threw open the helicopter doors. Instead, the helicopters were landed facing the control tower and at the centre of the airstrip. This not only gave the terrorists a place to hide after the gunfight began, it instead put Snipers 1 and 2 in the line of fire of the other three snipers on the control tower. The snipers were denied valuable shooting opportunities as a result of the positioning of the helicopters, stacking the odds against what were effectively three snipers versus eight heavily armed gunmen.

According to the same program, the crisis committee delegated to make decisions on how to deal with the incident consisted of Bruno Merk (the Bavarian interior minister), Hans-Dietrich Genscher (the West German interior minister) and Manfred Schreiber (Munich's Chief of Police); in other words, two politicians and one tactician. The program mentioned that a year before the Olympic Games were to be held, Schreiber had participated in another hostage crisis (a failed bank robbery) in which he ordered a marksman to shoot one of the perpetrators, managing only to wound the robber. As a result, the robbers shot an innocent woman dead. Schreiber was consequently charged with involuntary manslaughter. An investigation ultimately cleared him of any wrongdoing, but the program suggested that the prior incident affected his judgment in the subsequent Olympic hostage crisis.

Since the five German snipers at Fürstenfeldbruck didn’t have radio contact with one another (nor with the German authorities conducting the rescue operation) they  therefore were unable to coordinate their fire.  Their role was not as effective as it should have been.  The only contact the snipers had with the operational leadership was with Georg Wolf, who was lying next to the three snipers on the control tower giving orders directly to them and them only. The two snipers at ground level had been given vague instructions to shoot when the other snipers began shooting, however, they were basically left to fend for themselves. All of the  snipers should  have been in radio contact with each other so that their actions were coordinated.

In addition, the snipers did not have the proper equipment for this hostage rescue operation. The Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles used were considered by several experts to be inadequate for the distance at which the snipers were trying to shoot. The G3 rifles which are the standard service rifle of the Bundeswehr  at that time, had a 18-inch (460 mm) barrel. At at the distances the terrorists were, these snipers were required to shoot, a 27-inch (690 mm) barrel. When a rifle barrel is longer, the explosive gas that propels the bullet has a longer opportunity to propel the bullet out of the barrel ; hence there is a better chance  that would have ensured far greater accuracy. Further, none of the rifles were equipped with telescopic or infrared sights. Additionally, none of the snipers were equipped with a steel helmet or bullet-proof vest. No armored vehicles were at the scene at Fürstenfeldbruck, and were only called in after the gunfight was well underway.

There were also numerous tactical errors. As mentioned earlier, "Sniper 2", who was stationed behind the signal tower, wound up directly in the line of fire of his fellow snipers on the control tower, without any protective gear and without any other police being aware of his location.^[49] Because of this, "Sniper 2" didn't fire a single shot until late in the gunfight, when hostage-taker Khalid Jawad attempted to escape on foot and ran right at the exposed sniper. "Sniper 2" killed the fleeing perpetrator but was in turn badly wounded by a fellow police officer, who was unaware that he was shooting at one of his own men. One of the helicopter pilots, Gunnar Ebel, was lying near "Sniper 2" and was also wounded by friendly fire. Both Ebel and the sniper recovered from their injuries.

Many of the errors made by the Germans during the rescue attempt were ultimately detailed by Heinz Hohensinn, who had participated in Operation Sunshine earlier that day. He stated in his documentary; One Day in September that he had been selected to pose as a crew member. He and his fellow policemen understood that it was a suicide mission, so the group unanimously voted to flee the plane. None of them were reprimanded for that desertion.

The bodies of the five Palestinian attackers—Afif, Nazzal, Chic Thaa, Hamid and Jamal—killed during the Fürstenfeldbruck gun battle were delivered to Libya, where they received heroes' funerals and were buried with full military honours. On  September 8,  Israeli planes bombed ten PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon in response to the massacre. Up to 200 people were killed.

The three surviving Black September gunmen had been arrested after the Fürstenfeldbruck gunfight, and were being held in a Munich prison for trial. On October, 29, Lufthansa Flight 615 was hijacked and threatened to be blown up if the Munich attackers were not released. Safady and the Al-Gasheys were immediately released by West Germany and received a tumultuous welcome when their plane touched down in Libya and (as seen in One Day in September) giving their own firsthand account of their operation at a press conference broadcast worldwide

Further international investigations into the Lufthansa Flight 615 incident have produced theories of a secret agreement between the German government and Black September- release of the surviving terrorists in exchange for assurances of no further attacks on Germany.

In the wake of the hostage-taking; Olympic competition was eventually suspended for the first time in modern Olympic history after public criticism of the Olympic Committee's decision to continue the games. On September 6, a memorial service attended by 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes was held in the Olympic Stadium. IOC President Avery Brundage made little reference to the murdered athletes during his speech praising the strength of the Olympic movement and equating the attack on the Israeli sportsmen with the recent arguments about encroaching professionalism and disallowing Rhodesia's participation in the Games, which outraged many of his listeners. The victims' families were represented by Andre Spitzer's widow Ankie, Moshe Weinberg's mother, and a cousin of Weinberg, Carmel Eliash. During the memorial service, Eliash collapsed and died of a heart attack

Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany's  football match with  Hungary  carried noisemakers and waved flags, but when several spectators unfurled a banner reading 17 dead, already forgotten? security officers removed the sign and expelled those responsible from the grounds. During the memorial service, the Olympic Flag was flown at half-staff, along with the flags of most of the other competing nations at the request of Willy Brandt. Ten Arab nations objected to their flags being lowered to honor murdered Israelis, subsequently their flags were restored to the tops of their flagpoles almost immediately.

Willi Daume, president of the Munich organizing committee, initially sought to cancel the remainder of the Games, but in the afternoon Brundage and others who wished to continue the Games prevailed, stating that they could not let the incident halt the Games. Brundage stated “The Games must go on, and we must  and we must continue our efforts to keep them clean, pure and honest.” The decision was endorsed by the Israeli government and Israeli Olympic team chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin.

On September, 6, after the memorial service, the remaining members of the Israeli team withdrew from the Games and left Munich. All Jewish sportsmen were placed under guard. Mark Spitz, the American swimming star who had already completed his competitions, left Munich during the hostage crisis (it was feared that as a prominent Jew, Spitz might now be a kidnapping target). The Egyptian team left the Games on 7 September, stating they feared reprisals. The Philippine and Algerian teams also left the Games, as did some members of the Dutch and Norwegian teams. American marathon runner Kenny Moore, who wrote about the incident for Sports Illustrated, quoted Dutch distance runner Jos Hermens as saying “It's quite simple. We were invited to a party, and if someone comes to the party and shoots people, how can you stay?” Many athletes, dazed by the tragedy, similarly felt that their desire to compete had been destroyed, although they stayed at the Games.^[

Four years later at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, the Israeli team commemorated the massacre: when they entered the stadium at the Opening Ceremony, their national flag was adorned with a black ribbon.

Golda Meir and the Israeli Defense Committee secretly authorized the Mossad to track down and kill those allegedly responsible for the Munich massacre.  The accusation that this was motivated by a desire for vengeance was disputed by Zvi Zamir, who described the mission as “putting an end to the type of terror that was perpetrated in Europe.  To this end the Mossad set up a number of special teams to locate and kill these fedayeen, (Arab paramilitary group of fighters) aided by the agency's stations in Europe.

In a February 2006 interview, former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir answered direct the following questions:

Was there no element of vengeance in the decision to take action against the terrorists?

"No. We were not engaged in vengeance. We are accused of having been guided by a desire for vengeance. That is nonsense. What we did was to concretely prevent (such crimes) in the future. We acted against those who thought that they would continue to perpetrate acts of terror. I am not saying that those who were involved in Munich were not marked for death. They definitely deserved to die. But we were not dealing with the past; we concentrated on the future."

Did you not receive a directive from Golda Meir along the lines of 'take revenge on those responsible for Munich?

"Golda abhorred the necessity that was imposed on us to carry out the operations. Golda never told me to 'take revenge on those who were responsible for Munich.' No one told me that

The Israeli mission later became known as Operation Wrath of God or Mivtza Za'am Ha'El.  Reeve quoted General Aharon Yariv—who, he writes, was the general overseer of the operation—as stating that after Munich the Israeli government felt it had no alternative but to exact justice.

He said, We had no choice. We had to make them stop, and there was no other way. We are not very proud about it. But it was a question of sheer necessity. We went back to the old biblical rule of an eye for an eye.  I approach these problems not from a moral point of view, but, hard as it may sound, from a cost-benefit point of view. If I'm very hard-headed, I can say, what is the political benefit in killing this person? Will it bring us nearer to peace? Will it bring us nearer to an understanding with the Palestinians or not? In most cases I don't think it will. But in the case of Black September we had no other choice and it worked. Is it morally acceptable? One can debate that question. Is it politically vital? It was.

Benny Morris wrote that a target list was created using information from turned PLO personnel and friendly European intelligence services. Once completed, a wave of assassinations of suspected Black September operatives began across Europe. On April 9,  1973, Israel launched Operation Spring of Youth, a joint Mossad–IDF operation in Beirut. The targets were Mohammad Yusuf al-Najjar (aka Abu Yusuf), head of Fatah's intelligence arm, which ran Black September, according to Morris; Kamal Adwan, who headed the PLO's so-called Western Sector, which controlled PLO action inside Israel; and Kamal Nassir, the PLO spokesman. A group of Sayeret commandos were taken in nine missile boats and a small fleet of patrol boats to a deserted Lebanese beach, before driving in two cars to downtown Beirut, where they killed Najjar, Adwan and Nassir. Two further detachments of commandos blew up the PFLP's headquarters in Beirut and a Fatah explosives plant. The leader of the commando team that conducted the operations was Ehud Bara.

On 21^st of  July 1973, in the so-called Lillehammer affair, a team of Mossad agents mistakenly killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan man unrelated to the Munich attack, in  Lillehammer, Norway, after an informant mistakenly said Bouchiki was Ali Hassan Salameh, the head of Force 17 and a Black September operative. Five Mossad agents, including two women, were captured by the Norwegian authorities, while others managed to slip away. The five were convicted of the killing and imprisoned but were soon released and returned to Israel in 1975. The Mossad later found Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut and killed him on January 22, 1979 with a remote-controlled car bomb. The attack unfortunately killed four innocent passersby and injured 18 others. According to CIA officer Duane "Dewey" Claridge, chief of operations of the CIA Near East Division from 1975 to 1978, in mid-1976, Salameh offered Americans assistance and protection with Arafat's (leader of the PLO) blessings during the American embassy pull-out from Beirut during the down-spiraling chaos of the Lebanese Civil War. There was a general feeling that Americans could be trusted. However, the scene of cooperation came to an end abruptly after the assassination of Salameh. Te Americans were generally blamed as Israel's principal benefactor.

Simon Reeve also wrote  that the Israeli operations continued for more than twenty years. He details the assassination in Paris in 1992 of Atef Bseiso, the PLO's head of intelligence, and says that an Israeli general confirmed there was a link back to Munich. Reeve also wrote that while Israeli officials have stated Operation Wrath of God was intended to exact vengeance for the families of the athletes killed in Munich, few relatives wanted such a violent reckoning with the Palestinians. Reeve stated that the families were instead desperate to know the truth of the events surrounding the Munich massacre. Reeve outlined what he saw as a lengthy cover-up by German authorities to hide the truth of what really happened at the airport. After a lengthy court fight, in 2004 the families of the Munich victims reached a settlement of 3 million Euros with the German government.

An article in 2012 in a front-page story of the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that much of the information pertaining to the mishandling of the massacre was covered up by the German authorities. For twenty years, Germany refused to release any information about the attack and did not accept responsibility for the results. The magazine reported that the government had been hiding 3,808 files, which contained tens of thousands of documents. Der Spiegel said it obtained secret reports by authorities, embassy cables, and minutes of cabinet meetings that demonstrate the lack of professionalism of the German officials in handling the massacre. The newspaper also wrote that the German authorities were told that Palestinians were planning an "incident" at the Olympics three weeks before the massacre, but failed to take the necessary security measures, and these facts are missing from the official documentation of the German government.

In August 2012, Der Spiegel reported that following the massacre, Germany began secret meetings with Black September, at the behest of the West German government, due to the fear that Black September would carry out other terrorist attacks in Germany. The government proposed a clandestine meeting between German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel and a member of Black September to create a "new basis of trust." In return for an exchange of the political status of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO would stop terrorist attacks on German soil. When French police arrested Abu Daoud, one of the chief organizers of the Munich massacre, and inquired about extraditing him to Germany, Bavaria's justice secretary Alfred Seidl recommended that Germany should not take any action, causing the French to release Abu Daoud and the Assad regime to shelter him until he died at a Damascus hospital in 2010.

Two of the three surviving gunmen, Mohammed Safady and Adnan Al-Gashey, were allegedly killed by Mossad as part of Operation Wrath of God. Al-Gashey was located after making contact with a cousin in a Gulf State, and Safady was found by remaining in touch with his family in Lebanon. This account was challenged in a book by Aaron Klein, who claims that Al-Gashey died of heart failure in the 1970s, and that Safady was killed by Christian Phalangists in Lebanon in the early 1980s. However, in July 2005, PLO veteran Tawfiq Tirawi told Klein that Safady, whom Tirawi claimed as a close friend, was "as alive as he  was.

The third surviving gunman, Jamal Al-Gashey, was believed  to be alive as of 1999, hiding in North Africa or in Syria, claiming to still fear retribution from Israel. He is the only one of the surviving terrorists to consent to interviews since 1972, having granted an interview in 1992 to a Palestinian newspaper and having briefly emerged from hiding in 1999 to participate in an interview for the documentary One Day in September, during which he was disguised and his face shown only as  a blurry shadow.

Of those believed to have planned the massacre, only Abu Daoud, the man who claims that the attack was his idea, is known to have died of natural causes. Historical documents released to Der Spiegel by the German secret service show that Dortmund police had been aware of collaboration between Abu Daoud and neo-Nazi Willi Pohl  (aka E. W. Pless and, since 1979, officially named Willi Voss) seven weeks before the attack. In January. 1977, Abu Daoud was intercepted by French police in Paris while traveling from Beirut under an assumed name.  Under protest from the PLO, Iraq, and Libya, who claimed that because Abu Daoud was traveling to a PLO comrade's funeral he should receive diplomatic immunity, the French government refused a West German extradition request on grounds that forms had not been filled in properly, and put him on a plane to Algeria before Germany could submit another request. On  July 27,  1981, he was shot 5 times from a distance of around two meters in a Warsaw Victoria (now Sofitel) hotel coffee shop, but survived the attack, chasing his would-be assassin down to the coffee shop's front entrance before collapsing.

He was subsequently was allowed safe passage through Israel in 1996 so he could attend a PLO meeting convened in the Gaza Strip for the purpose of rescinding an article in its charter that called for Israel's eradication. In his autobiography, From Jerusalem to Munich, first published in France in 1999, and later in a written interview with Sports Illustrated,  Abu Daoud wrote that funds for Munich massacre were provided by Mahmoud Abbas, who has been the Chairman of the PLO since November 11,  2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority since January, 15,  2005.

Although he claims he didn't know what the money was being spent for, longtime Fatah official, Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, was responsible for the financing of the Munich attack.

Abu Daoud believes that if the Israelis knew that Mahmoud Abbas was the financier of the operation, the 1993 Oslo Accords would not have been achieved, during which Mahmoud Abbas was seen in photo ops at the White House.

Abu Daoud, who lived with his wife on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority, said that "the Munich operation had the endorsement of Arafat," (the former chairman f the PLO)  although Arafat was not involved in conceiving or implementing the attack." In his autobiography, Abu Daoud wrote  that Arafat saw the team off on the mission with the words “God protect you.”

Ankie Spitzer, widow of fencing coach Andre, declined several offers to meet with Abu Daoud, saying that the only place she wants to meet him is in a courtroom. According to Spitzer, “He [Abu Daoud] didn't pay the price for what he did.”

In 2006, during the release of Steven Spielberg's film Munich, Der Spiegel, he  interviewed Abu Daoud regarding the Munich massacre. Daoud was quoted as saying: "I regret nothing. You can only dream that I would apologize. Daoud died of kidney failure aged 73 on 3 July 2010 in Damascus, Syria

The Munich Olympic Games was the only Olympic Games where Palestinian terrorists killed anyone connected with the Games.  And the reason for that is because it was me who convinced Arafat, the then chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization to  no longer sanction terrorism by Palestinians in future Olympic Games and  to also publicly denounce terrorist acts.  I will tell you how this came about.

On November 22^nd 1974, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) as the representatives of the Palestinian people in the UN Resolution 3210 and Resolution 3236, and granted anyone attending the conference from the PLO, Observer status in all future UN Congresses. Judges, police and prison officials along with criminologists like myself were also recognized by the UN and are given Observer status also. We are now referred to by the UN as Individual Experts. We can address the Congresses but cannot vote. Since that first speech I gave in 1975 at the Congress held in Geneva, I have addressed the UN Congresses 15 times in Europe, Africa, South America and the Far Est.  

In September 1975, I was one of the speakers at the Fifth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders that was held at the UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland.

After I had just given a speech on terrorism, I was    approached by the representative of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.  It was an organization founded in 1964 with the purpose of bringing about the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle, with much of its violence aimed at Israeli civilians. The PLO sponsored terrorism wherever they wanted Israelis to be killed.

Before Israel attained its statehood, it was called Palestine and had been referred to as Palestine for centuries. Most of the people in that country were Arabs who called themselves Palestinians.  Needless to say, they were extremely upset when the Jews in the then Palestine won statehood for themselves in 1949 for what is now known as Israel.  For many years thereafter, the Palestinians of whom thousands were ejected out of Israel by the Israelis as if the Palestinians were boils on the Jew’s backsides.  The hatred between both factions festered for years and even to this day, the Palestinian boil on the backsides of the Israelis continues to fester.

Immediately after my speech, Faisal Oueda, the PLO official Observer to that Congress that we were both attending, approached me and asked me if I would join him for lunch as his guest. Now I am not one to refuse a free lunch so I agreed to break bread so to speak with my Palestinian host.  

As we talked during our lunch, I was nervous because Warren Allmand who was Canada’s Solicitor General and the head of the Canadian delegation was sitting at another table alone that was a short distance from where I and Oueda were sitting.

I was nervous for two reasons.  The first one was that the Canadian government had previously publicly announced that it would not truck (speak) with the members of the PLO and there I was speaking with an official of the PLO.

Now I wasn’t a member of the government and was actually attending the UN Congress as a private citizen. Further, the solicitor general had previously suggested to the UN that I should attend the Congress as a private Canadian citizen resulting in the UN then inviting me to attend the Congress as a Canadian Observer with the right to address the Congress if I choose to do so.

I was worried that Allmand was upset with me for two reasons. The first being that I was having lunch with a member of the PLO and the second reason was that in my speech, I condemned the UN’s proposed resolution that would create a United Nations Transnational Tribunal to try terrorists.  I said that jurisdictional problems would ensue. I even gave them a scenario showing how the problem would take place. Much to my surprise, the next day, the delegates vetoed the UN resolution. And strangely enough, three years later, the scenario I told the delegates that might occur, actually did occur just as I had previously forecasted.     

In any case, the Solicitor General approached me as we were walking down the long underground hallway that connects all the UN buildings.    He said he liked my speech and then he asked me if my lunch went well with the PLO Observer.  I told him that it did.

There was a good reason for that question. He wanted me to have a meeting with Oueda and for good reason. The Canadian government had publicly stated after the Munich massacre that it would never truck (speak) with Arafat, the chairman of the PLO. That was a stupid decision because in 1976, the Olympic Games would take place in Montreal, Canada.  This was not a time to infuriate Arafat.  

Since the Canadian government had stated that it wouldn’t talk to Arafat, they needed a non-government person to speak to his representative. Since Arafat’s representative, Oueda had invited me to have lunch with him; the door of communication was opened to       both the Canadian government and the PLO.  I am convinced that Oueeda recognized that possibility when he invited me to lunch. He knew he wouldn’t talk to the Canadian delegates as many of them were with the Canadian government. He knew that I was a Canadian because just before I gave my speech, I was referred to by the chairman of the session as a Canadian Observer. That meant that I wasn’t a member of the government.

I asked Oueda if he would like to talk to me further. He said he would. I asked him to meet me in a hour at one of the empty rooms. He agreed. I then spoke to the solicitor General about the proposed meeting. He then said, “Get our fat out of the fire.”

Oueda and I spoke for an hour. He gave me permission to record our conversation. I told him that if the Arafat wanted Canada to be his friend, there were four things he had to do first. He must make every effort to stop any Palestinian terror groups from killing anyone in our Montreal Olympic Games and all future Olympic Games. Further the PLO must stop sanctioning terrorist groups. Third, The PLO must not sanction the killings of Canadian citizens and finally, the PLO must publicly denounce terrorism. I told him that if Arafat agreed to these terms and keeps his word to undertake them, Canada will let the PLO have a branch office in Ottawa, Canada’s capital.

I learned a long time ago that if you have the upper hand, take whatever you can get. I was playing a pivotal  role in this matter so I milked it to its fullest.

Oueda said he would contact Arafat and let me know the next morning as to what Arafat’s decision would be. I then told the solicitor general what I said to Oueda and the instructions I gave him to inform Arafat of what I believed Canada would agree to.

When I told the Solicitor General what I had promised, he yelled, “YOU WHAT? I didn’t give you that authority. “I replied, “Sir. You told me to get our fat out of the fire. I believe that I have done that.” He then said to me, “If it works, Batchelor , the government will be grateful to you but of it doesn’t work, you will be persona non-grata to the government.”                                                              

The next morning, I met with Oueda and he said with a smile on his face that Arafat had agreed to all the terms I had laid out for him.

He really did keep his word to me and Canada kept my word to him.

I sent a copy of the tape recording of me and Queda  speaking to one another to the Solicitor General so that the government could have a voice stress evaluator detection test on Queda's voice to determine if he was telling me the truth when he said that Arafat would go along with my four demands I made for him.  The machine is a lie detection machine. It was determined that Oueda was telling me the truth when he told me that Arafat told him that he accepted the four demands I gave him via Queda.  The solicitor General later returned to me the cassette in which the recording was made. I still have it in my collection of my tape recordings. 

The following month, there was a terrorist bombing in the United States and Arafat publicly denounced it. After the Montreal Olympic Games were over, I attend a public forum on terrorism and the man who was in charge of the security of the Montreal Games in 1997, told me that they saw no sign of any Palestinians in the area of the Games. And every Olympic Games since the Munich attack, the Palestinians have not committed any terrorist acts in the Games.

In a future article, I will tell you about people who were flying to the Olympic Games or attending them who were killed or injured by terrorists but the terrorists were not Palestinians.