Meet me in Munich
"An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind,"
This is a link the script of my next video project (subject to changes in production)n
A Greenwich Village poet, 8/4/05
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Part one
The fields are alive with rushing feet, sweaty brows, javelins and distance jumpers, gymnasts and joyfully roaring crowds.
After welcoming the athletes, German President Gusav
Heinemann beams from his podium, as commentators on TV rattle on in hundreds of
languages about the day’s deeds, and how this is the first Olympics in
The talking heads says the German government has high hopes that the 1972 Olympics will help heal the wounds Hitler rent on the world.
Late on September 4, the Israeli athletes rumbled into their apartments in the Olympic Village, laughing and carousing, some singing “Sun Rise, Sun Set” and others “If I was a Rich Man,” from the show they had just seen.
It is hard for them to sleep. The excitement grows with each day and there are still six days of competition left and each expects to do well and to bring home glory to their still young homeland. Eventually all the eyes close and the parade of flags fades with the parade of thoughts and a tender quiet falls over their quarters, making them seem like children in anticipation of Christmas, each sprawled into the odd shapes tossing and turning had created for them.
Somewhere outside the fence perimeter, footsteps crunch over gravel in a march that grows louder as the feet come nearer and nearer to where the sleepers lay, the rattle of metal sounding with each step as hands grip heavily-laden duffle bags.
A clock through one of the windows shows that it is just
after
While there are people around inside and outside the compound strolling in the early morning hours, none seem to think the five figures dressed in track suits and moving towards the fence are unusual.
The five men had their heavy duffle bags over the six and half foot fence to three sets of hands waiting on the inside. Again comes the sound of metal rattling.
Then fingers and toes poking through the gaps in the cyclone fence, the five men join the three men inside.
The sound of scratching draws the attention inside the apartment of Yossef Gutfreund, an Israeli wresting referee, who is up early, sleepy perhaps in anticipating the day’s competitive events. He comes out of his bedroom and into the lounge barefoot. Some of the invaders apparently have pass keys and the door opens slightly allowing him to peer through the gap, his nose and one eye glimpsing the figures in the yard, eight men now donning ski masks and drawing weapons out of their bags. An Israeli security agent assigned to the team, he recognizes the language of the strangers as Palestinian and cries out, throwing his weight against the door even as the attackers push theirs against it on the outside. His bulky frame holds back the attack for a few moments,
“Hevre tistalku!” he yells in Hebrew, meaning, “Guys, try to escape.” The attackers sweep into the apartment waving their weapons.
Gutfreund’s cry wakes several athletes – allowing Tuvia Sokolovsky, a weight lifting coach, and another athlete to escape to slip out a window on the other side of the building, while the others hide.
The invaders, pushing the barrels of their weapons ahead of them, start to search, taking possession of five of the Israeli, tying their hands with pieces of rope they had pre-cut for this purpose.
Away from the complex at the time of the attack, Moshe Weinberg, the wrestling coach, makes a grab for the attackers, wrestles with two, knocking two of them down before another attacker shoots him in the face. His bleeding form left where it falls as the invaders step around him.
Two others, Joseph Romano and David Berger try to escape out the kitchen window. Failing to get out the window in time, Romano grabs up a kitchen knife and stabs one of the attackers. Another invader lifts the Kalashnikov rifle and shoots Romano. His body, too, is left where it falls.
The conflict delays the invaders long enough for eight more athletes to escape the other apartments. Despite the shooting, the attack seems to disturb little, although the two athletes who escaped the shooting run across the compound, looking like sprinters in the greatest race of their lives. They rush breathless to the security office where they report the attack.
Security details rush to the compound and surround it. And thus the stand off begins.
The TV set is on inside the complex. The invaders, now routinely called “Terrorists” by TV commentators, watch the set, apparently fascinated by the media attention the event has drawn. (see Media and Munich).
A short time later, they wave for someone from the German
authorities and give a piece of paper with their demands. They want 234
Palestinians freed from Israeli prison and two leaders of the Baader-Meinhof
gang released from a German jail in
Hasty discussions are held in the command center for the
operations.
But discussions are confused, tension rising as the deadline approaches – clocks ticking off the minutes as officials struggle to get their act together. At one point, a special unit of the military gathered to storm the apartments, but the TV broadcast the fact, and the Palestinian group called “Black September” obsessed with their own image, saw the report, and the attack was called off.
A strained-looking German police chief Mandred Schreiber is assigned the job of negotiating with a very frightened looking Ahmed Tourni, head of the Egyptian Olympic team. Tourni seems uncomfortable with the presence of Zvi Zamir, the head of the Israeli’s special forces unit, the Mossad, and several of his assistant. They in turn do not seem to trust him because he is Egyptian.
The negotiators buy time while struggling to come up with a
plan of action. They ask for an extension, get, it then another, get that, and
still another, and get that, although the police chief knows the patience of
the terrorists must be wearing thin. The Israeli’s look skeptical. Schreiber
offers Black September money in exchange for the hostages. Black September, led
by Luttif (Issa) Afif, a Jew, refuses, saying they don’t want money. The police
chief then offers to exchange the Israeli athletes with Germans. Afif refuses.
By
To make Tourni’s position even worse in regards to the angry
Mossad officers, his superiors tell him
Still under the skeptical eye of the Mossad officers, the police chief comes up with a plan of his own. He says the Germans will have to rescue the athletes. He agrees to transport them out of the country, although in hasty conversations with his staff, outlines a plan to kill the Arabs when they reach the airport – by deploying sharp shooters there to kill them when they become exposed. They also agree to transport the group to Furstenfeldbruck airbase rather than the international airport at Riem – figuring they could better isolate the terrorists.
Without being aware of events that are transpiring Reuters
News Service releases a report claiming the hostages were rescued. This flashes
across the screens even at the airport where things are taking a different
turn. And while a battle is brewing, people in
Not yet realizing that there were eight terrorists, the
police chief assigns five marksmen as snipers. Having no special forces with
sniper experience, he asked for soldiers who conducted target practice in their
spare time. He also arranged for a phony 727 to be brought to the airport and
had troops stationed inside it. At about
Following the movement of the terrorists in their scopes, the snipers soon realized the miscalculation and even without experience realize they cannot kill them all at once. The troops that are supposed to be in the plane flee. So that when the helicopters arrive and two of the terrorists walk over to inspect the plane, they realize the trap.
Without apparent orders and lacking radio contact with each other, the sharp shooters shoot at the two terrorists, who run. But lacking night vision equipment, the snipers cannot see the terrorists clearly. While one terrorist is hit, the other dodges the bullets. TV cameras whirl the whole time. Banks of televisions show the event as if dozens of events of this kind are going on at once. Two of the terrorists near the helicopters fall to the hail of bullets. The helicopter crews bolt for cover. Everything is in chaos. The terrorists fire back and a firefight is underway. A German police officer in the control tower is killed.
Finally armored vehicles arrive, and the terrorists seeing their advantage evaporate, toss a grenade in one of the helicopters killing all of the athletes there, and while that craft burned, the terrorists in the other shoot the athletes there.
In a moment that is dramatic to TV as the report on the explosion of the Hindenburg was to radio, ABC reporter Jim McKay reports with a broken voice, “They’re all gone!”
Part Two: Meeting in
Wael Zwaiter picked up my trail the minute I arrived in
This was hardly my first encounter. I had seen him in
While Zwaiter didn’t follow me into my hotel, he was waiting for me at the curb
when I came back out to head for the meeting with,
The last person I wanted Harari to see me with was a dead member of Black
September.
“Go away,” I told him as I made my way to the cab waiting at the curb.
Zwaiter said, “No.”
The cab driver, who apparently didn’t speak Israeli, but wondered just who I
was talking to since I was clearly not talking to him, glanced around at the
empty sidewalk with an expression of growing concern.
“Look, I didn’t ask for you to tag along,” I told Zwaiter.
“I wasn’t looking for an invitation,” Zwaiter told me.
Unable to locate the partner to my conversation and unwilling to have me in his
cab, the driver ground gears and sped up before I could open the door.
“See what you’ve done,” I said. “Go away.”
Since the hotel I had to meet Harari in wasn’t far away, I decided to walk.
My footsteps scraped the pavement has I rushed off. Zwaiter’s steps made no
sound as the floated behind me.
But Zwaiter did breathe funny, not through his mouth, but through the 28 bullet
holes in his chest where my Mossad hit squad had shot him years earlier.
I should have expected Zwaiter. He was the one I saw most. Probably because he
was the first of the 11 members of Black September my team killed – 11 of them
for the 11 of the Israeli athletes they killed in
Except for one or two, I mostly didn’t see the others I had killed until I
mistakenly went to the city where we did the deed – something I rarely did and
would never do again. But they were all here in
At intervals, I saw the other faces floating in the shadows, watching me as I
walked by, watching Zwaiter as he floated behind me. I wondered if each member
of the team had one of these ghosts, something like a guardian angel, the way I
had Zwaiter, to always remind us of what we had done.
But it was a subject I was too nervous to discuss with the others. What if I
was the only one who saw them? What if my team mates decided I had gone crazy?
Then I might not ever get my money. They would have me committed. So instead, I
waited for one of them to broach the subject, but they never did.
I would have tried to kill them again if anyone could kill a ghost since if I
know how to do anything it is how to kill. I learned well in those days after
the September Olympics in
But all I really wanted was to learn how to turn the damned talent off. Was
there some kind of spigot inside of me that I could turn that would leave that
part of me empty again and I could go back to living my life the way I once
had, a minor member of the Mossad rather than a member of its most notorious
and successful hit squad – there by riding myself of ghosts like Zwaiter.
Yet there was one ghost I wanted to see but could not.
I couldn’t even remember what my brother’s face looked like even after I had
seen old photographs from his athletic days before he died in
Maybe this had something to do with the fact that all we got back from that day
in September were the charred remains of his body found in the one helicopter
the terrorists had blown up.
Had I seen his body lying in a coffin I might have been able to remember him.
I had no problem remembering everything else.
I remembered the first reports from
Then I worried over the fact that he was among the nine hostages the terrorists
had kept.
I went to see Harari right away, begging him to let me be a part of the rescue
effort I was certain we had to mount.
Harari told me to calm down. No one was going because the German Government
wouldn’t allow an Israeli task force to operate on German soil.
“It’s a legal thing,” he explained. “The Germans will do it themselves.”
I had no confidence in
I didn’t believe the Germans would look out for my brother’s safety either.
But then, my fears seemed groundless when Reuters reported all of the hostages
rescued. I remembered people dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv.
I also remembered how crushed I was a few hours later when Reuters reported
their error and I heard the NBC announcer’s despairing voice say, “they’re all
gone.”
I went to Harari this time and insisted I be allowed to become a member of the
team that hunted down the killed. I thought it would appease my brother’s
memory a little if I could be part of the group that brought them to justice.
Harari, reluctant at first, agreed, but warned me that we would be killing
these people not bringing them back for trial. When this alarmed me a little,
he assured me that no one innocent would die.
This was a lie.
Now with 11 of the terrorists dead, as well as a handful of others, including
two of our own, I wanted out. I wanted no more part of the killing or the
ghosts.
“Look, Zwaiter,” I told my ghost when he continued to follow me. “You don’t
want to go where I’m going this time. I’m going to meet up with Harari. You
know him. He’s the one that sent us out to kill you.”
That seemed to make Zwaiter lose stride, though that might have been my
imagination. What did the dead have to fear from the living? It was the other
way around.
When I reached the hotel, I found to my relief it was not a place that I had
stayed at previously or even held meetings in, and if I shut my eyes to the
city noises and the mingling of Swiss, French and Italian I could have imagined
myself in a hotel in New York City where old ghosts seemed reluctant to go.
Even Zwaiter seemed to have vanished for the moment, as if he and his cohorts
were condemned to follow the trails they had taken during their own lives,
their dead footsteps locked into the footsteps of their former living selves.
They could not haunt places they had not haunted in life. Or perhaps Harari –
like some dark avenging angel – even have power to influence them in death.
I let the fantasy of New York linger a little, taking it a little further,
pretending that I had never learned to kill in the first place, had never
prowled the streets of European’s biggest cities in my constant urge for
revenge, never had to memorize the 35 faces on the list of targets to that we
might kill them if we saw them.
Harari, seated at a private table in the back of the hotel’s restaurant, gave
me a nod and a smile when I entered. He seemed pleased to see me, but he said
he was concerned.
“I didn’t like the sound of your voice when you called me on the phone,” he
said.
“I was upset when I found out the bank wouldn’t release my money,” I said and
sat across from him at the table.
No waiters approached us. We sat far away from other people with only the
people outside passing the window for company.
“But you’re all right now?”
“Better,” I said. “But I still would like to know why the account is frozen.”
“Standard procedure,” he said.
“But we were supposed to have access to the money if we decided to quit,” I
said. “That was part of our agreement.”
“Sure it was,” Harari said. “But we don’t want people charging off in the heat
of emotion. We wanted to make certain you really meant it. After all, we have a
lot invested in you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we would like you to think things over for a while, take some time
off, take a vacation, don’t do anything rash,” Harari said.
But there was a threat hidden in his tone, a fearful reminder of just who I was
dealing with, that ruthless slayer some of our team nicknamed “Archangel
Michael” – the most war like of the eight archangels, and the one who lead the
fight against Lucifer in the battle for Heaven. But I saw no wings spouting
from the large man’s back, and if anything, I thought I saw horns on his
forehead.
“I can’t wait,” I said, keeping my peace about his horns and my ghosts. “I’m
tired and confused.”
“And you also know too much to walk around as if nothing has happened,” Harari
said, sternly. “You know who we work and without the team you would become an
easy prey for those that want to destroy us. They would snatch you up off the
street and grill you until they got what they wanted, and then they would make
you pay for the part you played in hurting them. You would suffer and your dead
brother would not be avenged.”
“Leave my brother out of this,” I said.
“I can’t. You brought him up to me when you begged to get involved. Or did you
choose to forget that?”
“I remember. But that’s all over now. They killed 11; we killed 11. The score
is even. The game can end on a tie.”
“The game never ends,” Harari said. “Each death we inflict on them makes them
inflict death on us.”
“Then why do we keep killing them if all it does is make
them more violent?”
“Because it’s the only tool we have.”
“There must be something else,” I said, “Something that doesn’t spread more
hatred.”
“If you have a better answer, I’m willing to listen,” Harari said. “But you
must remember they are always out there, prowling ever city like ghosts. They
know who we are now and they know we mean to kill them. So they will try and
kill us first, and will use you to that end if we let them.”
The word ghosts stirs a panic up in me. Did Harari
know of my haunting? Had he seen them, too? Had the others? Was this one of
those deep secrets the Mossad kept silent about – that men like me carried around
the ghosts of their victims like a chain, adding a new link with every murder?
Yet it bothered me that we only saw the people we hated, not those we loved.
Perhaps those ghosts only came to those of us with pure hearts at which point
we could see them and their shinning lights. If so, then I was determined to
become pure again, to cleanse my soul of the terrible things I had done, and by
stopping now, I hoped I could reverse the process, and perhaps eventually
become pure enough to envision my brother’s face clearly in my mine.
“I’m sorry, Michael,” I said. “But there’s no point in arguing with me. I’m
determined to quit. I’m not going to kill anybody else in the name of God or
country.”
I never did tell Harari about what happened that night in the house with
Mahmoud Hamshiri when I had gone there posing as a reporter in order to set a
bomb to kill him later. The man who had helped plan the death of my brother
told me about the death of his sons, and his uncles, and of those Arab families
still morning the loss of loved ones that had died as the result of Israeli
bombs. These ghosts were his ghosts that he said he would carry to his death.
This, of course, was still too early in my guest for
vengeance. The memory of
Later, of course, I heard those stories again and again, each
time Hamshiri’s ghost caught up with me. Of all the ghosts, Zwaiter and
Hamshiri haunted me most, appearing to me in city after city, each bearing the
message of their troubled people – making it impossible for me to ever walk in
those cities again without feeling their pain as well as my own.
“So what are you going to do when the terrorists come to
collect you?” Harari asked.
“I won’t be here. I have plants to move to
“And you think they won’t come after you in
“This is 1980, Michael,” I said. “If they haven’t gone to
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Harari said, suddenly angry. “Perhaps they haven’t
thought of it yet, but they will. Perhaps they don’t have the resources to
mount an attack there, but they will get them. Eventually, they’ll park a truck
of explosives under a bridge or a building, or fly a jet into a skyscraper. But
it’ll come. And if you’re there, they’ll come for you, too.”
Refusing to have his logic overwhelm me, I shook my head. “Are you going to
give me the money or what?”
“No, I’m not. Because you’re not quitting.”
“I’m tired of killing,” I said. “I just want to live a normal life.”
“You can’t go back,” Harari said. “You made a choice and you’re going to have
to live with it. I can assign you to a desk job if you like in a supporting
role.”
“That won’t do,” I said, thinking that I would never get rid of the ghosts like
that. “I might not be pulling the trigger, but I would still be killing people
indirectly.”
I kept thinking I would never see my brother’s face again unless I severed all
ties, completely, and I was as bound and determined now to see his face as I
was after his death to avenge his murder.
“You’re a bigger fool than I thought,” Harari said, in a rare display of rage.
“I should have listened the others were against hiring you. They told me they
didn’t want anyone with a personal motive. `White heat cools,’ the told me. ‘We
need people who will do this coldly, who can kill and kill without passion
growing cold. Your reason was too personal. You thought only of the pain of
your brother and bringing the killers to justice. But now that they are dead,
you’ve lost your taste for blood when there are others out there as vicious or
more so who we need you to kill.”
“But I can’t kill them,” I said. “I killed people who I know were guilty. I
want no part of what you’re planning. My job is done.”
“Is it?” Harari asked. “What about the risk to us?”
“I won’t talk,” I said.
“Perhaps, and perhaps you’ve never been tested in that way.”
“And what would you do, kill me?”
“The matter has been discussed,” Harari said. “Then, of course, there is your
family to think about.”
“Are you threatening my family, too?”
“I made no threat, unless you take it that way,” Harari said. “But as resistant
as you might be to their torture, how quickly would you give in if they
tortured your family?”
“Not in
“Anywhere.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You’ll leave only if I let you leave,” Harari said. “And if you leave this
hotel alive, I need some reassurance that you won’t talk or sell us out to
those friends of yours Papa and the Le Group.”
His face shuddered with suspicion as he stared at me, my shape taking on a new
meaning as a potential enemy. The change stirred something up in the wind. It
was as if he had thrown open the doors and invited all of hell to join us, and
they did, the parade of victims hobbling in from their remote space outside,
Zwaiter with his bullet-ridden chest, Hamshiri with his head half blown off,
and the others, missing arms or legs, holes clear through faces or chests, and
still others I did not know, those who Harari's other groups had killed,
now part of a massive army of the dead to which there was no defense, out of
reach of any hit squat short of the army of archangels themselves.
The angle of light on Harari’s upturned face seemed to
illuminate it in a way I had never seen before and suddenly, I knew something
that I never suspected.
“You’re right,” I said. “No place is safe. Not here, not
“What the devil are you talking about?” Harari asked.
“I’m talking about your culture of violence, and your need to keep it going in
order to justify what you do. You need there to be terrorists so that you can
keep on going out there and killing them. And on the other side there’s a batch
of characters just like you, egging you on, making certain that you keep
killing so that they like you have reason to keep fighting and keep killing.
Without the murder and mayhem, you would be lost and so would they.”
I stood up, shook, my head, “I really feel sorry for you, Michael. But I’m
afraid I have to go. We will not meet again in this life time.”
“You will be sorry,” Harari said.
“I already am. But I’m getting over it. Hopefully, you will, too, though I
think you’re too deep in blood to ever get out.”
And just like that I wanted out, knowing that Harari would not bother me or my
family again, and at that moment the city seemed clearer and brighter and
purer, as if all that was evil had blown away with the wind.
And at that moment, I realized that I was walking alone, no of the usual
suspects clinging to my heals. I glanced back. All of
my ghosts and the many more I did not know floated around Harari. He did not
see them. He stared too intently at me.
I waved and turned and walked down the boulevard, and at that moment, I
remembered what my brother looked like, his face becoming a vivid portrait in
my mind.