Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response
By Aaron Klein
Published by Random House, 2005

More on Israel’s Munich Olympics mop-up that Spielberg didn’t tell you, complete with Bangkok’s role and the forgotten next-of-kin. My review for The Nation, published this month.

The other side of the who-did-what debate that boiled up again when Steven Spielberg’s film “Munich” came out last year arrives at Asia Books in the form of Aaron Klein’s “Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response”.

Klein, a Time magazine correspondent and a captain in the Israeli Defence Force’s intelligence unit, was at the forefront of critics who said the movie and the book it was based on, George Jonas’ 1984 “Vengeance”, were riddled with errors. Spielberg could plead artistic licence, but not Jonas.

“Munich”, Klein said, was “full of distortions and flights of fancy that would make any Israeli intelligence officer blush.” Nevertheless, he, Spielberg and Jonas are covering the same cloak-and-dagger turf — they have to agree on some things.

“Striking Back” shares with “Vengeance” (review here) a thriller appeal, both recounting Palestinian terrorists’ abduction of 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Games and the massacre that followed in a botched rescue attempt, and then tracking Mossad’s assassination squads as they hunt down those responsible.

In Jonas’ book and the movie, though, there was just one squad, a lone pack of wolves handed a mission by the Israeli government and then cut loose in the interest of maximum deniability to deal with the 11 names on their list. Klein, having talked to 50-odd Mossad people, from foot soldiers to commanders, says this is nonsense.

The hit squads were Mossad operatives from start to finish, he wrote in a 2005 essay for Slate magazine. “No list of targets was ever given to an assassination team. Indeed, there was no ‘one team’ charged with carrying out any sort of ongoing revenge operation.” The targets were chosen on a case-by-case basis as evidence mounted that they were likely to plan further attacks, according to Klein, and “assassination teams were sent out, mission by mission, as evidence and opportunity warranted”.

Nor was there any “Avner”, the central hit-squad leader in “Vengeance”, Klein’s contacts told him, and even if there is such an organisation as Jonas’ Paris-based “Le Group”, Mossad wouldn’t be turning to it for information and logistics.

Leaving Hollywood out of the equation, readers are left with a dilemma in sorting out the truth between two books that offer no disclaimers. Unfortunately, for lack of clear evidence one way or the other, the reader can’t win. The best you can hope for is that an entertaining read compensates for the fact that you still don’t know, and probably will never know, what really went down behind the scenes of an important historical event.

Having said that, Klein’s version seems the more plausible. An Israeli and a Jew, he nevertheless chastises his government for a slew of blunders and shreds “the Mossad myth” — that the intelligence agency is invincible and infallible. More to the point, he challenges the basic premise behind the Munich revenge killings.

Prevention and deterrence Klein wholly accepts as motives, but revenge — particularly in the form of assassination — he does not, primarily because it is prone to misdirection, to error. And of the targets, Palestinian poet Wael Zu’aytir was “at best, a small fish”, hardly the major terror organiser that Jonas portrayed. In fact, Klein says, only six of the 16 people Mossad took out were top-level terrorist operatives, and only one was involved with the Munich horror. Another victim was simply the wrong guy.

Klein, however, applauds Israel for having, through bloodshed, prevented future terrorist attacks. That is his bottom line.

Whereas Jonas’ “Avner” saw the killings as ineffective, Klein cites strong evidence to show that at least two of them halted or stymied terrorist plans. Wadi Haddad’s faction of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine collapsed after his assassination and the number of attacks against Israeli targets abroad plummeted. The terrorist group A-Tzika simply disbanded when its leader, Zuhir Mokhsan, was eliminated.

Local readers will be interested in a chapter centring on the December 28, 1972, hostage taking at the Israeli embassy in Bangkok. Fatah’s Black September came searching for “weak links in Israel’s defences”, he writes, and despite post-Munich security warnings, “the Thai pace of affairs, their distance from Europe, and the fact that Thailand was low on Israeli’s list of priorities all contributed to the laissez-faire security deployment at the embassy”.

Also, it happened to be the day that His Royal Highness Maha Vajiralongkorn was being elevated to the status of crown prince, and the Bangkok authorities were not at all happy about this highly disrespectful turn of events.

Four armed Palestinians “breezed” in, seized six Israeli hostages and tossed out to police the names of 36 prisoners they wanted released from jails in Israel. Then-Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn joined the Israeli ambassador outside ready for a standoff, when the Egyptian ambassador arrived and, in the course of overnight negotiations, persuaded the terrorists to leave with him on a Cairo-bound plane.

The hostages were released at the airport and the Palestinians winged away just as Israeli military officers arrived to plan the rescue, their government “ready to do all in its power to avoid another tragic end to a hostage situation”.

In return for its audacity, Black September got plenty of publicity for its cause, and two months later Israeli handed over several Palestinian corpses to Lebanon in a gesture of “gratitude to Thailand”.

In his article for Slate, Klein lamented that “Munich” the movie spared no footage to show the “incompetence” of the German “rescue operation”. This is indeed one of the revelations of his book, as is the decades-long battle that the families of the slain athletes fought for compensation – for at least a look at the official records of the attempted rescue and even the autopsies of their loved ones. Germany stonewalled them disgracefully.

Probably understanding this aspect of the affair alone is worth the price of “Striking Back”.