Eurasia Press & News
Israeli assassinations in response to the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre may have been about more than avenging the victims.
One of the intriguing subplots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is understanding exactly what happened during and after the Munich Olympic Games in 1972, when Palestinian gunmen belonging to the Black September group took Israeli athletes hostage and later killed eleven of them.
The commonly expressed version of the tragedy, perhaps best reflected in Steven Spielberg’s film Munich, is that the Palestinian officials whom Israel assassinated in retaliation for the operation were all guilty of having been involved. The most prominent among them was Ali Hassan Salameh, who was assassinated by the Mossad in January 1979 in Beirut. But there were also others, including three Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) officials the Israelis killed in Beirut in April 1973—Kamal Adwan, Kamal Nasser, and Mohammed Youssef al-Najjar. The theme that underlines this standard narrative is one of Israelis acting against the perpetrators of a heinous crime with ruthless, yet moral, precision.
However, this template for the Munich operation was challenged in 1999, when Mohammed Daoud Audeh, better known by his nom de guerre Abou Daoud, published his memoirs, in collaboration with the French journalist Gilles de Jonchay. Abou Daoud’s main contention was that it was he, not Salameh, who had organized the Munich operation. In part, this was motivated by the fact that in February 1973, the Jordanians had arrested Abou Daoud and compelled him to admit to a false account of Munich that suggested he was not responsible.
Why did Abou Daoud tell a story that was untrue? While he offers an explanation, it is incomplete and only raises more questions. He argues that the head of the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate at the time, Mohammed Rasoul al-Kilani, had advised King Hussein in March 1973 to spare Abou Daoud and other Palestinians who had been arrested with him. Abou Daoud speculates that his doctored account, read over Radio Amman, was Kilani’s way of pushing back against those in Jordan who had criticized him for persuading the king not to execute the Palestinians. That may be true, but Abou Daoud never really explains why Kilani wanted to save Abou Daoud and the others in the first place.
For all intents and purposes, the Israelis have since accepted that Abou Daoud was involved in Munich. In his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, who has very good sources in the Israeli intelligence services, describes Abou Daoud’s central role in the operation. However, if one accepts Abou Daoud’s account, then the Israeli assassinations after Munich, which struck down Adwan, Najjar, Nasser, and Salameh, all targeted people who had nothing to do with what happened to the athletes. Nor does it appear that Adwan and Nasser ever participated in operations that had been carried out under the Black September appellation.
Bergman addresses this problem in his book. He quotes the former head of the Mossad’s counterterrorism unit, Shimshon Yitzhaki, as saying that the Israelis were confident that Salameh was involved. Yitzhaki dismisses Abou Daoud’s memoir as “[wanting] to take all the credit for himself.” Yet this sounds rather too convenient. The details in the book about the preparations for Munich are extensive, showing Abou Daoud’s intimate knowledge of how the operation was organized and carried out. Certainly, the bogus Amman confession must have stuck in his craw, but had he written Salameh out of the story in an unjustifiable way, this would have posed a greater risk to Abou Daoud’s reputation among Palestinians. If anything, all the signs are that he wrote a truthful account.
An explanation for the confusion might be sought in the true nature of Black September. In the Israeli narrative, the organization appears to be one that was well-structured, under the command of the PLO’s then deputy head Salah Khalaf. Bergman describes it as “another of the ever-evolving Fatah factions…” Seen in this light, Salameh and Abou Daoud both were cadres of a relatively cohesive Black September organization, so that Israel’s response against any of its operatives could more broadly be read as striking back against the perpetrators of Munich.
However, if Black September was a much looser affair, more a label than a group, this would change the story. It would mean that being a nominal member of Black September did not necessarily indicate any link to Munich at all, so that Israeli assassins might have targeted the wrong people. And if the Israelis were aware of this ambiguity, their assassinations may have been motivated by facts having little to do with Munich, but which they nonetheless justified as reprisals for Munich.
In his memoir, Abou Daoud himself writes that Black September was “not an organization as such, but an alias that Fatah commandos took on.” My colleague Yezid Sayigh, who wrote a book on the Palestine Liberation Organization, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement 1949–1993, would tend to agree. As he noted in a recent exchange, “There is confusion in the portrayal of Black September as a clear-cut organization. It assumes a level of formality and structure in how Fatah did things that is incorrect. Fatah was very fluid. A lot was driven by personal and factional rivalries, often quite petty. But also, it was a reflection of the sort of initiative individuals could undertake, especially after the defeat in Jordan [in an] atmosphere of fear, paranoia, and the sense of being under siege. There was a general instinct to hit back at [Fatah’s] enemies, keep them off balance, and portray [Fatah] as very active. This allowed several people to go off on their own initiative.”
Indeed, Abou Daoud implies that the Munich operation reflected such initiative. He, Khalaf, and Omari agreed to the idea at the Piazza della Rotonda in Rome. That the three survived tends to work against the image of Israel as a country thorough in its righteous retribution, even if the Israelis acknowledge that Mossad made a major blunder in July 1973, when they mistakenly killed a Moroccan waiter, Ahmad Bouchikhi, in Lillehammer, Norway, thinking he was Salameh.
Salameh’s assassination six years later has been portrayed as the final chapter in Israel’s cycle of revenge for Munich. In his book, Bergman cites an Israeli official, Yair Ravid, as saying, “Killing Salameh was first and foremost a matter of closing the Munich account.” But Bergman himself notes that people who had worked with Salameh strongly denied the accusation. He goes on to imply something that has long been suspected about Salameh’s assassination, namely that the real reason he was eliminated was that Israel wanted to sever the link between him and an important figure in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Robert Clayton Ames. This belief is shared by Ames’ biographer, Kai Bird, in his book The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, as well as by former CIA officials cited by Bird.
Therefore, far from being about terrorism, Salameh’s assassination was a cynical effort by the Israelis to deny Palestinians a direct channel to Washington, one that might circumvent the Israelis. However, maintaining the premise that the killing was payback for Munich allowed the Israelis to sidestep blame from the CIA that Israel had done away with one of its prized intelligence assets. Few were fooled, however, Ames among them. Bird quotes Meir Harel, a former director general of Mossad, as saying, “We knew Salameh was talking to the Americans. And I came to know later that Ames was very angry with us when Ali Hassan was killed.”
If Munich was used as a headline to justify Salameh’s killing, then serious questions must arise about the guilt of others killed in Munich’s name. The answer to these questions will help us to determine whether Israeli revenge killings were as precise, or indeed as moral, as many people have presented them.
