Mossad assassinations following the Munich massacre

Overview

The Mossad assassinations following the Munich massacre were part of Israel’s response to the murder of 11 members of its Olympic team on September 5, 1972. Gunmen from Black September attacked the Israeli delegation at the Olympic Village in Munich, took hostages and killed the athletes and coaches. In the years that followed, the Mossad pursued figures linked to the attack and to the wider organization of attacks against Israelis. Operations extended from Rome and Paris to Nicosia and Beirut. Israel also sent commandos into Beirut in April 1973 to kill senior PLO figures.

The campaign combined intelligence gathering, surveillance and killings carried out by small teams. Its targets included Black September operatives, PLO officials and members of allied armed groups. Some were described as planners or coordinators of the Munich attack; others were targeted for roles in the broader network. The campaign therefore cannot be reduced to the pursuit of the eight gunmen who entered the Olympic Village. Five of those attackers died during the failed German rescue attempt, while three survived. Subsequent accounts differ over how closely every person killed by Israel was connected to the Munich operation. The killings in Europe, the Beirut raid and the later pursuit of Black September operations chief Ali Hassan Salameh nevertheless formed a sustained Israeli response to the massacre.

That response had a grave failure. On July 21, 1973, Israeli operatives shot and killed Ahmed Bouchikhi, a waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, after mistaking him for Salameh. Norwegian police arrested members of the team, exposing the operation and sharply restricting Israel’s ability to pursue targets outside the Middle East. Salameh remained alive until January 22, 1979, when a remotely detonated bomb killed him in Beirut. His death was a separate, later operation; it did not change the fact that Bouchikhi had been an innocent victim of mistaken identity.

Background

Black September emerged from the violent rupture between the PLO and Jordan in 1970. Yasser Arafat created the organization in 1971, and its operations gave PLO-linked militants a means to attack Israeli and other targets abroad. After Black September attacks, Arafat denied a connection to the group. The organization’s relationship to the PLO and its leadership became central to Israel’s assessment of who planned, enabled or supported the Munich massacre. Black September also made two unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Israeli prime minister Golda Meir in 1972, placing the danger to Israeli officials alongside the danger to civilians and athletes.

The Munich Olympics brought Israeli athletes to an international event intended to be open and peaceful. Members of the delegation lived in apartments within the Olympic Village, where security proved inadequate to stop armed attackers. Black September used the Games’ global audience to turn a hostage seizure into an international crisis. Its gunmen demanded the release of prisoners while holding members of the Israeli team. For Israel, the assault demonstrated that its citizens could be targeted far from home, even at a sporting event under the protection of another state.

Meir’s government faced the immediate task of responding to the murder of its athletes and the continuing activity of the organizations behind attacks abroad. Mossad chief Zvi Zamir was in Munich during the crisis and witnessed the disastrous end of the attempted rescue. Meir subsequently authorized Israeli operations against Black September leaders and associated operatives in Europe and the Middle East. Zamir and counterterrorism adviser Aharon Yariv were among the senior officials involved in shaping the response. Accounts of a single fixed list of Munich perpetrators, pursued by one team in a simple sequence, do not accurately describe the wider campaign.

The attack

Before dawn on September 5, 1972, Black September gunmen entered the Olympic Village and attacked the Israeli team’s apartments. Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Yossef Romano were killed during the initial assault. Nine other Israelis were taken hostage. Hours of negotiations followed as German authorities sought to secure their release. The gunmen and hostages were eventually moved by helicopter to Fürstenfeldbruck air base, where German police attempted an ambush. The rescue failed. All nine remaining Israeli hostages were murdered, and a German police officer also died. Five gunmen were killed; three were captured alive.

The first prominent killing in Israel’s ensuing European campaign was that of Wael Zwaiter in Rome on October 16, 1972. He was shot in the entrance area of his apartment building. On December 8, Black September field commander Mahmoud Hamshari, identified as a coordinator of the Munich massacre, was attacked in Paris when a bomb concealed in his telephone exploded. The method reflected the campaign’s reliance on intelligence about a target’s movements and surroundings. These killings took place in countries where Israeli operatives had no public law-enforcement authority, making secrecy central to the operations and their political consequences.

In January 1973, Hussein al-Bashir was killed by an explosion in a hotel room in Nicosia, Cyprus. On April 6, Basil al-Kubaisi, a member of the PFLP described as involved in the Munich massacre, was gunned down on a Paris street. The operations were distinct in place and method: shootings in Rome and Paris, a bomb in Nicosia and the telephone bomb used against Hamshari. Together, they showed the geographical reach of Israel’s pursuit and the breadth of the network it targeted. The record of individual roles remains more complex than a claim that every person killed had personally entered the Olympic Village or directed the hostage taking.

On the night of April 9–10, 1973, Israeli commandos carried out Operation Spring of Youth in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. Mossad personnel gathered intelligence and helped the raiding force reach its targets. A team led by Ehud Barak entered the city by sea, traveled in civilian vehicles and approached apartments housing senior PLO figures. Some commandos wore disguises to avoid attracting attention in the streets. The raiders killed Mohammed Youssef Najjar, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser in their apartments. Israeli accounts placed the men within the network connected to the Munich massacre, while the operation also struck PLO leadership and operational capacity in Beirut.

The Beirut raid was a military operation supported by Mossad intelligence, rather than an assassination carried out solely by Mossad personnel. Other Israeli units attacked additional sites that night. The fighting killed Lebanese police and guards, and two Israeli commandos died during a separate part of the raid. Najjar’s wife was also killed. The operation brought the campaign into a densely populated capital and had consequences beyond the three principal targets. It demonstrated Israel’s ability to combine overseas intelligence work with a short commando assault, while showing the human costs that could accompany such an operation.

Israel’s pursuit of Ali Hassan Salameh led to the campaign’s most consequential mistake. Salameh was Black September’s operations chief and a central target in the search for those responsible for Munich. In July 1973, an Israeli team followed a man in Lillehammer whom its members believed to be Salameh. On July 21, operatives shot him as he walked home with his pregnant wife. He was Ahmed Bouchikhi, a waiter with no connection to Black September. Salameh was elsewhere. Norwegian police traced the team’s movements and arrested operatives involved in the mission. The exposed identities and ensuing prosecutions severely damaged Israel’s ability to continue comparable operations in Europe.

The pursuit of Salameh continued after Lillehammer. Mossad placed an operative under deep cover in Beirut to study Salameh’s movements and security. The operation required years of observation because Salameh lived behind protection and had escaped the earlier attempt to find him. On January 22, 1979, a remotely detonated bomb killed him in Beirut. This later killing reached the intended Black September figure. It must be distinguished from the Lillehammer shooting, in which the person killed was an innocent civilian whom the team had wrongly identified as Salameh.

Victims

The 11 murdered members of Israel’s Olympic delegation were David Berger, Ze’ev Friedman, Yossef Gutfreund, Eliezer Halfin, Yossef Romano, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Yakov Springer and Moshe Weinberg. They were athletes, coaches and officials whose lives and work extended well beyond the event that made their names known internationally. Weinberg and Romano died in the Olympic Village; the other nine died at the air base. Their families spent decades seeking full recognition of the massacre and answers about the failed rescue.

The later Israeli campaign produced victims of its own. Bouchikhi’s killing was a fatal failure of identification, witnessed by his wife, and became the defining example of the danger of acting on mistaken intelligence. The Beirut raid also killed people beyond its three senior PLO targets, including Najjar’s wife, Lebanese personnel and two Israeli commandos. Recording those deaths does not equate the original murder of Olympic hostages with Israel’s response. It gives a complete account of the people killed across the events linked by the post-Munich campaign.

Perpetrators and responsibility

Black September carried out the Munich massacre. Its gunmen seized the Israeli delegation, held nine members hostage after killing two and murdered the remaining captives during the failed rescue. The organization was created by Arafat in 1971, although he denied a connection after its attacks. The distinction between the gunmen on the ground and those who planned, supplied or directed operations mattered to Israel’s response: most of the people targeted after Munich were not among the attackers seen at the Olympic Village.

The Mossad conducted covert killings and supplied intelligence for the Beirut raid. Israeli commandos carried out the apartment assaults there. Meir’s government authorized the broader response, while Zamir oversaw Mossad during its early years. Mike Harari led an operational unit active in the European campaign and commanded the team involved in the Lillehammer failure. Responsibility for Bouchikhi’s death rests with the operatives who shot him and the Israeli operation that misidentified him. Norwegian arrests and court proceedings made that responsibility public in a way the earlier covert killings had not been.

Descriptions of the campaign as a complete elimination of Munich’s planners overstate its outcome. Some people identified with the original attack survived for many years, and historians disagree about the direct role of certain Israeli targets in Munich itself. The campaign’s reach was broader than a search for surviving hostage takers: it struck figures Israel associated with Black September, PLO leadership and continuing attacks. That breadth explains both why the operations continued after the original gunmen were dead or captured and why the connections between individual targets and the massacre require careful distinction.

Response

The Lillehammer killing transformed the campaign’s operating conditions. Norwegian investigators recovered evidence, arrested Israeli operatives and brought the clandestine mission into open court. Harari offered Meir his resignation after the mistake; she refused it. The incident damaged Mossad’s reputation and significantly restricted Israel’s capacity to pursue attackers outside the Middle East. It also made the costs of a false identification unmistakable: an innocent man had been killed, and the organization’s methods and personnel were exposed.

Israel continued to regard Salameh as a priority after the Norwegian failure, leading to the separate 1979 operation in Beirut. The years between the two events matter. Lillehammer was neither a successful attack on Salameh nor a preliminary stage of his death; it was a wrongful killing with its own victim and consequences. The eventual bomb attack on Salameh showed that Israel’s pursuit had continued despite those consequences. It also marked one of the best-known later actions in a campaign whose early operations had followed closely upon Munich.

The campaign shaped subsequent discussion of targeted killing, state responsibility and the protection of citizens abroad. Munich revealed catastrophic failures to protect athletes and rescue hostages. Israel’s response showed its determination to reach organizers of attacks across borders. Lillehammer showed the danger when intelligence and operational confidence outran reliable identification. Those facts belong together in any account of the campaign: the murder of the Olympic delegation explains its origin, while the wrongful death of Bouchikhi remains an essential part of its history.

Remembrance

The Munich victims remained the focus of efforts by their families and Israeli officials to secure lasting recognition within the Olympic movement. A memorial ceremony was held during the 2016 Games, and a memorial to the 11 Israelis opened in Munich’s Olympic Park in 2017. At the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, the delegation was officially commemorated. The remembrance centers the people murdered at the Games, whose names can otherwise be lost within accounts of the armed campaign that followed.

Accounts of the post-Munich assassinations also preserve the distinction between Salameh and Ahmed Bouchikhi. Salameh, a Black September operations chief sought by Israel, died in Beirut in 1979. Bouchikhi, a waiter mistakenly identified as that target, died in Lillehammer in 1973. Remembering both events accurately is necessary to understand the campaign’s purpose, its reach and its most serious failure.