Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response Read Online Free PDF

desk and picked up his package.
    The senior members of Fatah, working under the name Black September, sighed in collective relief when they learned that the baggage had safely arrived. The operation was on track, progressing exactly as planned. They had thirteen more days. They’d act on the tenth day of the Olympics, in the early morning hours of Tuesday, September 5, 1972.

    Black September was unveiled in the fall of 1971. It was born on the heels of a massacre. In mid-September 1970, King Hussein, the ruler of Jordan, had his back against the wall. Palestinians, who by that time represented nearly 60 percent of the Jordanian population, were on the brink of toppling his regime. Bloody battles erupted in the streets of the capital, Amman. Thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered by Hussein’s army. The surviving activists, overpowered, fled for their lives. Thousands entered Syria and from there continued on to the neighborhoods surrounding the Lebanese capital of Beirut. Once there, they began to rebuild their terrorist infrastructure.
    Black September’s primary mission was to avenge the killings committed by Hussein’s Hashemite regime. Its first undertaking was the assassination of Wasfi Al-Tell, the Jordanian prime minister—a man they saw as a sworn enemy of the Palestinians. Al-Tell was gunned down in the Cairo Sheraton on November 27, 1971. One of his killers bent down and, to the astonishment of eyewitnesses, lapped up Al-Tell’s blood.
    The murder of the prime minister was the first of a slew of revenge killings. Black September operatives, acting in Europe, detonated bombs in the Jordanian embassy in Geneva, lobbed Molotov cocktails at the embassy in Paris, and fired a machine gun at the ambassador to England.
    Black September was different from other Palestinian terror organizations: it had no offices, no addresses, no official leaders, and no spokespersons. Fatah members embraced the secrecy surrounding Black September, feeding its aura of mystery, its martial might and propaganda potential. But Black September was not as autonomous as it seemed—Salah Khalaf, widely known as Abu-Iyad, deputy of Arafat and one of the commanders of the Fatah, was Black September’s unofficial leader.
    Black September’s goals were far more than simply revenge. Arafat and other Fatah leaders wanted to demonstrate their power and display—in no uncertain terms—their international prominence after their defeat at the hands of the Jordanians. Fatah leaders also made a strategic decision to become involved in international terrorism, particularly in Europe, where left-wing factions of the Palestinian resistance were hijacking planes and pulling off many different high-profile terrorist stunts, their popularity growing across the Middle East and indeed around the world as a result.
    Abu-Iyad never acknowledged his leadership of Black September; he, like Arafat, disavowed any connection to the group. Arafat, when asked about his relationship to Black September at the time, offered this: “We don’t know anything about this organization nor are we involved in any of its activities, but we do understand the mentality of young people who are willing to die for the life of Palestine.” The technical arrangement whereby Fatah would quietly take the credit for, and publicly disavow any connection to, terror attacks, suited Arafat: it allowed him to build a facade of respectability as head of an organization with clean hands and legitimate, nationalistic aspirations—while approving sensationalistic attacks behind the scenes.
    Black September disseminated information on a need-to-know basis. Beyond Abu-Iyad, few were allowed to see the complete picture. Its structure consisted of two inner circles. The first was comprised of Abu-Iyad’s disciples. Mohammed Oudeh, an operations officer known as Abu-Daoud, was the most senior. He was the architect of the Munich operation. Fakhri Al-Omri, the operations officer and a rising