Vengeance
By George Jonas
Published by Harper Perennial, 2006

From Munich to Munchausen

Spielberg’s film about the aftermath of the Olympic massacre resurrects a 1984 book about Israeli hits quads – and all the controversy that bled from it. My review for The Nation, printed in May 2006.

Canadian journalist George Jonas would wince at the cover blurb linking this re-release of his 1984 book to Steven Spielberg’s “Munich”, except that that’s why it was re-released, after all, and it’s no doubt selling a lot more copies now than it did on its original outing.
Jonas didn’t like the movie, complaining it had inverted his premise that terrorism and counterterrorism are two different animals. You can read his quite funny assessment of Hollywood’s shenanigans in “The Spielberg massacre”, an article he wrote for McLean’s magazine that’s on his website.
Avner – the book and film’s central character – “doesn’t look anything like Eric Bana”, he quips.
Far more worthy of complaint is that the film aroused a whole new generation to the debate on the veracity of “Vengeance”, and Jonas weathered plenty of grief on that score two decades ago.
Part of the problem is that he wrote the story of Israel’s retribution for the Munich Olympics killings as a thriller. Heavy with dialogue, it comes across as spy fiction, even though it’s presented as a factual account of a Mossad hit squad’s lethal operation in Europe in the mid-’70s.
More crucial to its critics is that Jonas’ had just a single source, identified only as Avner. Most feel he made up the story, not Jonas, and Time’s Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein – who also wrote a book about the Israeli revenge killings – insists that, contrary to Avner’s assertion, none of the several hit squads was given a list of targets.
In “Vengeance” and “Munich” (and “Sword of Gideon”, a 1986 TV movie based on Jonas’ book), Avner and his team work from a roster of 11 people who were directly involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.
Klein says the targets were variably chosen and assigned, not in connection to the Munich massacre but as terrorist threats in general. Nor were the hit men “former” Mossad men, given the assignment and then cut loose for reasons of deniability, as in the movies and Jonas’ book. “In fact,” Klein writes, “assassination teams were the head of a spear; behind them were analysts and informational gathering units in Israel and in Europe, a whole network that was focused on both supplying the agents with information and properly directing their operations.”
Klein’s ultimate criticism, one echoed by others, is aimed at “Le Group”, a pan-European gang of disenchanted enablers who Mossad paid for information about its targets and auxiliary services. Even if Le Group existed, the critics say, Mossad would never have used it.
In the book (I haven’t seen the films), Avner wrestles with the merit of paying informers who are also used by the terrorists, and even relies at one point on an old friend who’s ended up in Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang. The rationale is acceptable enough, but the audacity is far-fetched in the extreme.
Answering his challengers’ charges of Baron Munchausen-style tall tales, Jonas quotes a New York Times writer as saying parts of the book are “as convincing as a Breughel”, and seems to think this a compliment. I find the Dutch painter completely inventive, lost in whimsy, but maybe that’s just me.
In the 2006 edition, Jonas lengthily tries to answer all of the unfriendly fire in both an epilogue and an afterword called “Notes on a controversy”. His sincerity seems beyond doubt, but in the end he can only fall back on words to the effect that “that’s what I was told and I believe it” – fundamentally, he says, because Avner “knew how the light switch worked in an obscure apartment building in Rome”.
Leaving the factual debate in the dark and switching on the lights of the story, it’s a tight little read, often quite exciting – loads of drama, family storms, guilt and exultation, philosophy, travel and of course guns and bombs. There is much satisfying stuff about espionage techniques and covert organisations. Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat and Golda Meir put in memorable appearances.
Interestingly, the book is anticlimactic – several of the targets on the hit list are still alive and well when the mission is aborted – yet this can only add to Avner’s credibility. Less guts, less glory translate in to more believability.
But when the book was re-released last December, Reuters managed to do what Avner’s team could not: track down Abu Daoud, the assassins’ No 2 target. “Vengeance”, the former killer said without elaborating, is “full of errors”.
When it originally came out, “Vengeance” was the first book to appear simultaneously on both the fiction and non-fiction bestseller list in Britain. It’s still bouncing between categories, and Spielberg didn’t help at all.

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Footnote: Evidently Abu Daoud is still alive and loving it. He recently told a reporter that he was sitting in a café with a buddy fuming over the International Olympics Committee’s refusal to let a Palestinian team play in its Games, so that’s why they decided to snatch some Israeli athletes and hold them for ransom. Simple as that.