Replies

THE SHOOTOUT: "Condemned to fail from the beginning"

But on the plane, not 15 minutes before the helicopters touched down, the policemen were in an uproar over what they regarded as a suicide mission. Most of the officers were to be holed up in the rear of the aircraft, where they believed a single terrorist grenade could incinerate them. As for the officers posing as pilots, they would be in the line of fire from the police at the rear of the plane -- and were unpersuasively disguised besides, having been issued incomplete Lufthansa uniforms. After hearing them out, the officer in charge, Reinhold Reich, polled his men, who voted unanimously to abandon the mission. It was a mutiny inconceivable to an Israeli, and Ankie Spitzer, Andrè Spitzer's widow, still fumes at the Germans' lack of courage. But West Germany, not to be trusted with soldiers and guns, had no special forces unit, nothing like Israel's Sayeret Matkal or the U.S. Army's Delta Force.

American Air Force officers accompanied the coffin of weightlifter David Berger, the last hostage to die, back to the U.S. AP

With the helicopters moments from touchdown, Wolf's plan, such as it was, now rested on the police sharpshooters -- five of them.

The helicopter pilots had flitted about the sky to give the Germans time to prepare the assault and permit a third helicopter, carrying Schreiber, Genscher and Merk, to beat the others to the airfield.

"Lousy thing to happen at the last minute," Schreiber told Wolf when he found him.

"What lousy thing?" asked Wolf.

"That there are eight of them."

"What? You don't mean there are eight Arabs?"

"You mean you're just finding that out from me?"

Wolf was. For unknown reasons, he thought that there were only five terrorists. No one had told him that three postal workers headed for work that morning had seen the Palestinians scaling the fence and had already provided police with their best guess as to the number: seven or eight, according to two of the postmen; 10 or 12, according to the third. In the underground garage, a policeman had counted the eight terrorists boarding the bus.

Yet now, critically, the snipers didn't know they were outnumbered, even though German TV had reported the postal workers' accounts. Schreiber's testimony to investigators from the Bavarian prosecutor's office as to why he hadn't focused early in the day on the number of terrorists would reflect the crossed signals characterizing the operation: "I was sure somebody" -- somebody else -- "would count them as soon as an opportunity presented itself."

Now the plan rested on the accuracy of five sharpshooters, none of whom deserved the title. Two had been picked from the Bavarian riot police. The other three were Munich police officers. None had any special training. All had been chosen simply because they shot competitively on weekends.

Nevertheless, three took positions on the terrace of the control tower. A fourth lay on the tarmac, behind a low concrete parapet. The fifth took cover behind a fire truck.

The helicopters touched down at 10:35 p.m. The four pilots and six of the fedayeen emerged. As other Black Septembrists held the pilots at gunpoint, Issa and Tony walked over to inspect the jet. Their suspicions already aroused by the lengthy helicopter transfer, they must have gone on full alert when they found the plane empty. As they jogged hastily back toward the helicopters, Wolf gave the order to open fire.

The events that followed are still a Rashomon-like fog of chaos, gore and contradiction. This much seems likely, however: Gunfire filled the air for the first four minutes. With six terrorists visible, snipers killed two and mortally wounded a third. But the other three, including Issa and Tony, scrambled to safety. As the pilots dashed for cover, the Palestinian survivors of that first fusillade ducked beneath and behind the helicopters, from where they shot out as many of the airport lights as they could. Anton Fliegerbauer, a police brigadier posted near a window at the base of the control tower, took a fatal bullet.

That flurry of gunfire gave way to an eerie stalemate of more than an hour, during which neither side got off more than a few shots. At this point some sort of SWAT team might have stormed the Palestinian positions. But a police "special assault unit," helicoptered in about an hour after the shooting began, for some reason landed at the far end of the airfield, more than a mile from the action, and was never deployed. "The biggest failure was not having enough sharpshooters," says Ulrich Wegener, a lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr who served as Genscher's aide-de-camp that day and went on to lead the GSG-9, the special-forces unit that the West German government established within two weeks of the fiasco. "The second biggest failure was not having special forces that could storm the helicopters."

Alternatively, German forces might have attacked with armored personnel carriers. But six such carriers ordered to the scene had gotten stuck in traffic, much of it caused by curiosity seekers flocking to Fürstenfeldbruck, as if it were the venue for another Olympic event. One carrier had mistakenly lit out for Riem, Munich's civilian airport, on the other side of town, as had scores of police. In a Keystone Kops moment, the driver of one police car happened to hear the correct destination on the radio, slammed on the brakes and caused a pileup.

Just before midnight the carriers finally arrived to bear down on the helicopters. Only here did the hostages lose their lives, to judge by what can be pieced together from portions of that long-suppressed Bavarian prosecutor's office report. A terrorist strafed the four hostages inside one helicopter, killing Springer, Halfin and Ze'ev Friedman and wounding Berger. Then he sprang to the ground, wheeled, and flung a grenade back into the cockpit before being shot dead as he fled.

Before fire from that explosion reached the fuel tank and turned the helicopter into an inferno, Issa emerged defiantly from beneath the other chopper with Kalashnikov blazing, strafing the Germans. Police killed him and a second fedayeen with return fire. At this point another commando, believed to be Jamal Al-Gashey's cousin Adnan, raked the remaining five hostages -- Gutfreund, Schorr, Slavin, Spitzer and Shapira -- with fatal gunfire.

Berger would be the last hostage to die. He had taken two nonlethal bullets in his lower extremities, only to perish of smoke inhalation. (Firefighters at one point braved gunfire to douse the helicopter with foam but were forced to retreat to cover.) Three fedayeen, alive and largely unhurt, lay on their stomachs nearby, two of them playing dead. They were captured, and 40 minutes later, with the help of dogs and tear gas, police tracked Tony to the refuge he had taken beneath a railroad car on the fringe of the airfield, killing him during a brief gun battle.

The last shot, fired at about 12:30 a.m., ended nearly three hours of an operation that, as an official involved later put it, "was condemned to fail from the beginning." To this day the Germans have never satisfactorily explained why they didn't deploy two or three snipers for each terrorist. The gunmen had neither precision rifles nor bulletproof vests. The military airfield was only moderately lit, so the police had erected three mobile lighting towers, but on this moonless night the towers cast stark shadows, as did the helicopters' long rotor blades, and none of the snipers had been issued night-vision goggles. Several nights later, during a reconstruction exercise, members of a team from the Bavarian prosecutor's office positioned themselves exactly where the five police gunmen had been. With night-vision goggles, each was able to distinguish figures within the helicopters.

Indeed, the police shot as much in the figurative as the literal dark. They hadn't merely been kept ignorant of how many terrorists to expect; no one had told them precisely where the helicopters would be landing and hence what might be the optimal positions to take up. "The helicopters landed directly in front of me and thus exactly in the line of fire of the shooters on the tower," the policeman behind the concrete parapet told the inquiry of the prosecutor's office. "Had I known they were landing where they actually did, I would have chosen another position."

Finally, the policemen had no two-way radios with which to coordinate an operation that had to take out the commandos virtually at a stroke. When Wolf, from his post in the tower, gave the order to fire, only three gunmen were in a position to hear him; the other two, who were to begin shooting when they noticed the first three doing so, found themselves in the line of fire of their comrades and had to take cover. So in effect three riflemen were left to take out the eight terrorists. That trio's shooting was only enough to disable three of the fedayeen immediately and to alert the other five that the day's negotiations had been a ruse.

In their negligence suit the families of the victims charged that saving the hostages became subordinate to Brundage's desire to remove the crisis from the Olympic Village. Wegener suggests as much. "The Village," he says, "was like a church, a cathedral." It was almost as if the Germans had said, There's no way we can save the hostages. Let's at least save the Games.

Even as the shootout continued at the airport, a rumor had cruelly mutated into fact. At 11 p.m. Conrad Ahlers, a spokesman for the West German federal government, told reporters that all the hostages had been liberated. The wire services sent this misinformation around the world, and Israeli newspapers hit the streets on Sept. 6 repeating it in banner headlines. Even Golda Meir went to bed believing the Germans had freed the nine captives.

On the morning of the 6th the grim truth became known. "Until today, we always thought of Dachau as being near Munich," said Israeli interior minister Josef Burg. "From now on, unfortunately, we'll say that Munich is near Dachau."

Willi Daume, the president of the Munich organizing committee, at first wanted the remainder of the Games called off, but Brundage and others talked him out of it. "I too questioned the decision to continue," says Vogel, the former mayor of Munich, "but over time I came to believe that we couldn't let the Olympics come to a halt from the hand of terrorism."

So, after a memorial service on Sept. 6, the Carefree Games resumed. Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany's soccer match with Hungary carried noisemakers and waved flags, while authorities did nothing to intervene in the name of decorum. Yet when several spectators unfurled a banner reading 17 DEAD, ALREADY FORGOTTEN? security sprang into action. Officials seized the sign and expelled the offenders from the grounds.

It's part of the protocol of every Olympics that organizers shall publish an official report of great scope and heft. Munich's is Teutonically comprehensive. It praises Mark Spitz for his feats in the pool and Olga Korbut for hers on the mats, and the informal Olympic Village for its contribution to the relaxed spirit of the Games. And it recounts the atrocities perpetrated on members of the Israeli delegation in dispassionate, mostly exculpatory prose. Then it adds this grotesque rationalization: "After the terrible events of September 5, 1972, it was once again the atmosphere of the Olympic Village which contributed a great deal to calming down and preserving peace among the athletes."

THIRTY YEARS LATER: "This will be a very secure place"

Today most of the apartment block at 31 Connollystrasse is filled with middle-class Germans going about the banal business of living. Well-tended flowers spill from windowsills. A young girl prances off with her bicycle. A memorial plaque by the main doorway is in temporary storage, but it will return in the spring, after renovations are complete on the pedestrian-only street.

If you know what went on there, however, the scene hints at the sinister. The plastic tape of the construction cordon suggests the crime scene the spot once was. Chain-link fencing is a reminder of what the Black Septembrists scaled to steal into the Village. On the side of the building, faded graffiti evokes the ferment of another time, of shouted slogans and violent means.

The door that leads from the street to the foyer and stairwell is locked. During the 1972 Olympics that door was never locked.

The entryway and apartment where Moshe Weinberg and Yossef Romano were murdered now belong to the Max Planck Institute, a scientific think tank. A sign reads PLEASE RESPECT THE PRIVACY OF OUR GUESTS. "Of course we all know what happened," one of the three residents, all Russian scientists on contract with the institute, recently told a stranger who knocked on his door anyway, "but none of us knows exactly where the guys were murdered. We don't want to know. If we knew, it would make it very hard to live here."

In their negligence suit the families of the victims argued that the Germans should have anticipated some attack. If it wasn't enough that Georg Sieber laid out the entire plan, Black September had staged five operations in Europe over the previous 10 months, including three in West Germany, and, the families allege, German intelligence sources had received at least three reports between Aug. 21 and Sept. 2 of Palestinian terrorists flowing into the region. Early in 2001 the Germans, who the families say had for years denied that a report on the disaster even existed, finally settled with the families, offering a pool of $3 million in compensation, to be paid out in equal thirds by the German, Bavarian and Munich governments. (This was in addition to bereavement funds of $1 million doled out by the German Red Cross in the immediate aftermath of the attack.) But the families have yet to receive any money from this "humanitarian" fund, and they believe that the Germans haven't released all the evidence that exists. Moreover, they still wait for an expression of remorse or responsibility. "If they would only say to us, 'Look, we tried, we didn't know what we were doing, we didn't mean for what happened to happen, we're sorry' -- that would be the end of it," says Ankie Spitzer. "But they've never even said that."

Sieber has never again worked with an organizing committee for a sporting event. "It's nothing but frustration," he says. "The officials aren't able to develop a tradition because everyone is a rookie. Nine out of 10 aren't paid -- they're volunteers -- and the paid professional can't lead them. If you're not a professional, you incur no risk, take no responsibility. This disaster in Munich, it was a horror trip, the whole thing, a chain of catastrophes large and small. Who paid? O.K., the German government paid, but of those individuals who were responsible, no one paid. We can't change the past. But more important, we're not learning for the future, because nothing's really different."

In fact Munich changed forever how the Olympics are conducted. Athletes at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid stayed in a Village built to be so secure that it was eventually converted into a prison. Later that year, in Moscow, the Soviets X-rayed every piece of incoming luggage at the airport and deployed 240,000 militiamen to show they meant business. Though the U.S.S.R.'s boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles was surely payback to the U.S. for passing up those Moscow Games, the Soviets claimed they stayed home because of inadequate security, even as the L.A. Olympics introduced such gadgets as a remote-controlled robot that could examine suspicious objects. Sixteen years ago the IOC began to collect and share information related to security and in 1997 formally established a "transfer of knowledge" program so Olympic know-how -- from the food tasters for athletes in Seoul to the palm-print recognition technology in Atlanta -- could be passed from one organizing committee to the next. To help Athens prepare for 2004, security experts from Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Spain and the U.S. are collaborating with Olympic organizers and the Greek authorities.

If you accept Santayana's maxim that those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it, you could argue that Munich organizers recalled their past all too well, thereby inviting a horror of a different sort. But while the Greeks have their own historical baggage, they seem to be toting it more lightly. The military junta that ruthlessly ruled from 1967 to '74 was detested by most Greeks, who pride themselves on living in the birthplace of democracy. A homegrown terrorist group, November 17, took its name from a bloody student uprising on that date in 1973, and over the past three decades its members have targeted various representatives of Western governments that supported that military rule, including the United States. November 17 has claimed responsibility for more than 100 attacks that have killed 22 people and wounded scores of others, yet there hadn't been a single arrest in 26 years.

Then, in June, police caught a break. A bomb accidentally exploded in Piraeus, the port of Athens, gravely injuring the man carrying it. Tips poured in, and over the next several weeks police raided November 17 hideouts, seized weapons and charged at least 10 people with involvement in the group. A senior Western diplomatic official posted in Athens also points approvingly to the government's plan to deploy at least 7,000 armed troops in the streets during the Games. "The public reaction to that announcement was silence," he says. "Given the aversion of the average citizen here to anything that smacks of the junta, that was a big, big sign. But then this is a post-9/11 Olympics, and 9/11 changed the way all of us look at the world. Plus, people take a lot of pride in being Greek. They want to look good in the eyes of the world."

Those in the security field believe that no group poses a greater threat to the 2004 Olympics than al-Qaeda. Many experts suspect that "Afghan alumni" have joined up with al-Qaeda cells in Albania, the anarchic, predominantly Muslim nation that abuts Greece to the north. The challenge will be to secure a country that has long been a transfer point between Europe and the Middle East -- to protect not only Greece's rugged mountain borders, but also thousands of miles of coastline and hundreds of ports. As one Israeli counterterrorism expert puts it, "It's so much easier to bounce from the Middle East to a barren island in Greece and then make your way to Athens than to travel halfway around the globe to prepare for an attack in Sydney."

The concrete structures of Athens' Olympic Village are sprouting at the base of Mount Parnis, on the northern edge of the city. Builders and suppliers desperately try to keep to a schedule, despite several work stoppages and four on-the-job deaths. Most of the 2,300 workers on the site are Greek, but scores of them aren't. "We don't screen everyone," says Katerina Barbosa, an official with the private company building the Village. "But at this point we have nothing to fear. By the end of the year this will be a very secure place."

Sieber is out of the business of tabletopping the Olympics and refuses to talk specifically about Athens. But he brings up one of his 30-year-old scenarios, one that might give Greek organizers pause, especially in light of the dynamite and hand grenade discovered early this month buried next to the 1896 Olympic stadium, which is slated to be used as a venue in 2004. "[The Basque separatist group] ETA is very patient," Sieber says, his imagination vivid as ever. "They pick out a man they want to kill. They send one of their operatives, disguised as a worker, to the construction site for his new home and plant a bomb. For several years they do nothing. Then one morning, perhaps after he is married, with a family, they detonate it by radio. He finds himself up in the sky."