Barely two months after the ambush operation in south Lebanon, Black

Barely two months after the ambush operation in south Lebanon, Black September seized and murdered members of the Israeli team at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. As soon as the news broke on the morning of September 5, I phoned Ahrahle Yariv as head of military intelligence. “You need to send us,” I said. I tried to persuade him that if it came down to an operation to free our hostages, Sayeret Matkal offered the best hope that it would not end in a bloodbath. We had the mind-set, the background, the training and now the experience. I also knew the German military had no special-forces unit. ’'d have been even more worried if I had known that German law barred the army from operating in peacetime. That meant any use of force would be left to the police. Ahrahle told me it was too early to say what involvement, if any, Israel might have. He’d get back in touch with a decision when it came. I called my officers together to begin planning. I decided to use the men who had been with me for the Sabena mission, including Mordechai Rachamim. We collated information from the stream of media reports from Munich and assembled a rough idea of the layout of the building the terrorists had attacked. As for the attackers, I said we had to assume there were at least half-a-dozen, that they had not just AK-47s but grenades or other explosives. And that like the Sabena hijackers, they would be prepared to die but hoping to live. All of that turned out to be true. None of it, however, could alter the reply I got from Ahrahle a couple of hours later. “We decided to send Zvika,” he said. Zvika Zamir was the head of Mossad, and he would be going only as an observer. Any operation against the terrorists would still be in the hands of German units. The German police’s bungled attempt to end the ordeal was especially painful because it was so predictable. I believe that if we had been there, at least some of the eleven Israelis killed might not have lost their lives. The Germans launched an ambush at a NATO airfield outside Munich, when the terrorists and hostages were ostensibly on their way to board a flight for Cairo. We know now that there was no properly co-ordinated plan. Too few police were deployed for the operation. They were insufficiently armed, and they lacked relevant training or experience. The result: a bloodbath. As a final insult to the memory of the murdered Israelis, although the three surviving terrorists were jailed, the 133 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011604