of Black September in France, but offer no real evidence. In early December 1972, while an Israeli agent posing as an Italian journalist met Hamshari in a café, at least two Israeli explosives experts entered his apartment and planted a small explosive device under a table by his telephone.
The next day, after Marie-Claude had left to take Amina to school, the "Italian journalist" rang Hamshari at his home.
"Is that you, Mr Hamshari?" asked the Israeli agent in Arabic. "Yes, I am Mahmoud Hamshari," came the response.
The Israelis immediately detonated their bomb. Hamshari was conscious for long enough to tell astonished Parisian detectives what had happened, but he later died in the hospital.
Other Palestinians were eliminated in the following months, before the Israelis launched their most daring operation, sending an elite squad of soldiers into Beirut to kill three senior Palestinians. Ehud Barak, the leader of Sayeret Matkal, the Israeli SAS, and later Israeli Prime Minister, led the mission disguised as a woman, with a black wig and make-up, and hand grenades in his bra. "I wore a pair of trousers because the skirts in fashion then were a little short and narrow," Barak has said. "I also had a very stylish bag, big enough for plenty of explosives."
The killings went on for at least two decades. Mossad agents have tried to claim they targeted Palestinians directly connected with the 1972 massacre. But only a couple of the Palestinians shot or blown to pieces during the operation appear to have been directly connected with the Olympic attack. Instead the dead were mainly Palestinian intellectuals, politicians and poets. And the consequences of these so-called "targeted killings" for Israel have been appalling.
Assassination was not a regular Israeli tactic until Munich. Occasionally Israeli agents sent letter bombs to scientists developing rockets for enemy states, but it was Golda Meir who set a precedent for wholesale use of murder as a counterterrorism policy by authorising an assassination campaign in the aftermath of Munich. Since then assassination has been used to kill scores of terrorists and senior militants, including many of those responsible for major bomb attacks in Israel. In the absence of political solutions, the Israeli government and people have come to rely on targeted killings as their standard response to bombings.
However, many intelligence experts and senior Mossad officials privately admit targeted killings do not work. Assassinations spur revenge attacks on Israelis, and attacks can also go wrong. During Wrath of God, Israeli agents murdered an innocent waiter in Lillehammer, Norway. Several agents were captured and jailed. Then there are the moral and legal issues surrounding targeted killings. During Operation Wrath of God Israeli agents often killed their prey when alone. But since targeted killings became standard policy Israel has repeatedly fired missiles or dropped large bombs on targets, killing bystanders.
Until 11 September 2001, Israel was the only democratic nation obviously using targeted killings to counter terrorism. In July that year, the head of the Israeli army was forced to defend the killings after criticism from the Bush administration. But after 9/11 US policy shifted and Washington prepared a list of terrorists the CIA was authorised to kill. US officials even began studying Wrath of God for tips on how they could strike at al-Qa'ida. In November 2002, a senior al-Qa'ida commander was killed in Yemen when his car was hit by a missile fired by a pilotless US Predator.
Like their Israeli counterparts, American officials have found that once assassination is used as an occasional tactic it has a habit of becoming the norm. Predators have since been used in dozens of attacks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and other countries. US officials have even responded to the quagmire in Iraq by proposing the creation of special elite squads, managed or assisted by US forces. Yet using blunt military force against terrorists does not work. Even the supposedly clinical killings conducted by Israeli teams in response to the Munich massacre did not stop terrorism. Israelis are still dying in terror attacks.
Simon Reeve is the author of One Day in September, the full story of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre.
Simon Reeve
Monday, 5 July 2010
MUNICH MASTERMIND
Before the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Black September Organisation, or BSO (Ayloul al-Aswad in Arabic), was generally unknown except to a handful of Middle East specialists and intelligence services who followed a deadly game of exchanging assassinations between Palestinian guerrilla groups and the Israeli intelligence service Mossad.
The BSO, a splinter group from the Palestine Liberation Organisation, or PLO, was founded, its literature said, "to avenge blood of the martyrs of Black September" (20,000 as claimed by BSO and 1,000 according to Jordanians). The BSO coordinated with international terror groups like the German Bader Meinhof gang and the Japanese Red Army, in targeting Arab regimes who "backed" the Jordanian Army. In November 1971, the BSO assassinated Wasfi al-Tal, who was Jordan's prime minister in 1970, outside the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo, earning the wrath of President Anwar Sadat, who was turning Egypt away from Nasser's revolutionary path towards peace with Israel.
The BSO operations' chief was Mohammed Oudeh, a Palestinian former science teacher known by his nom de guerre Abu Daoud ("Abu" means "father of", and Daoud was his father's middle name given to his only son). Over five months Oudeh planned the attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, exploiting his contacts with Syrian intelligence as well as the East German Stasi, smuggling equipment and weapons to Munich, as he later told The Independent).
On 4 September 1972, Oudeh invited a dozen guests to dinner at a Munich restaurant near Munich Banhof, where he went over the final details of the operation. A few hours later, eight of them scaled the wall surrounding the Olympic athletes' village (another three look-outs were never caught). By 4:45am they had taken nine Israeli athletes hostages in their quarters after killing two who, they said, were armed secret agents (they were a weightlifter and a wrestling coach in the Israeli official version).
During 20 hours of negotiations BSO offered to exchange their hostages for 236 Palestinians in Israeli jails. Golda Meir, then Israel's Prime Minister, refused to negotiate.
Oudeh has been consistent, over many personal conversations, in interviews and in his 1998 book From Jerusalem to Munich, published a year later in English as Memoirs of A Palestinian Terrorist, that his clear instructions were "to avoid harming the hostages", whom he wanted to exchange. He later said that he deliberately prolonged negotiation to maximise publicity, "alerting the world to the Palestinian legitimate grievances").
Having aborted a previously rehearsed plan to storm the compound since television cameras were transmitting live to the world pictures of the outside building, which were also seen by the hostage-takers) the West Germans agreed to transport both captors and their hostages in two helicopters, to Furstenfeldbruck military airfield, where an aircraft was waiting to fly them to Cairo (the Egyptians, infuriated by BSO terror activities, had planned to arrest them, according to their official papers).
To everyone's surprise, the German security bungled an armed rescue attempt at the airport, resulting in a chaotic gun battle. When the smoke cleared, five Palestinians, a German police officer and all nine hostages' bodies were found on the runway and on the plane. An Israeli government statement vowed to hunt down and kill any Palestinian who had survived or who had been involved in planning the operation; special squads were recruited from Mossad for the mission, which went on for years.
Mohammed Daoud Oudeh was born in Silwan, East Jerusalem, in 1937. Trained as a teacher in Amman, Beirut and Cairo, he taught mathematics and physics in West Bank Palestinian secondary schools (administered by Jordan's ministry of Education). He later studied law and helped draft the PLO charter and constitution and assisted in other parliamentarian legal issues after joining the Palestinian National Council (or parliament).
He
