Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

For two years Mossad had carried out a carefully planned, clinically executed series of assassinations. The first was shot dead in the lobby of his Rome apartment eleven times—a bullet for each Israeli athlete he helped to murder. Another died when he answered a phone call in his Paris apartment; the bomb in the receiver blew off his head. The next to die was expertly pushed under a London bus at rush hour. In Nicosia, Cyprus, a bomb exploded in a bedside lamp. Hours before they died, each man’s family received flowers and a condolence card bearing the same words: “A reminder we do not forget or forgive.” After each kidon execution, a notice about the dead terrorist was published in Arab language newspapers across the Middle East. The flowers, cards, and notices had all been sent by LAP, Mossad’s department of psychological warfare. While the kidon carried out the executions, it had required a team backup of some eight units. One group was responsible for tracking down each Black September killer. Technicians from yaholomin, Mossad’s vaunted communications unit, set up eavesdropping equipment to monitor each terrorist as he was located. Another team organized dead-letter boxes in a dozen European capitals to receive messages from informers. Safe houses were rented for secret meetings in London, Paris, and Madrid.

Now, thirty-four years later, Steven Spielberg, arguably one of the world’s most successful moviemakers, has transposed the massacre into a $65 million film. When Dagan had heard of Spielberg’s intentions, he had been surprised to learn that Spielberg had made no approach to Mossad for, if not exactly seeking cooperation, at least asking for guidance on the accuracy of the screenplay. It was based on Vengeance by George Jonas, which had been published in 1984 to be quickly dismissed by Mossad as “mostly pure fantasy.”

In the book Jonas claimed to “explore at first hand the feelings and revulsion and doubt that gradually came to haunt each member of the Mossad hit team and which, in the end, inexorably changed their view of the mission and themselves.” He concluded that his story—the genesis of the Spielberg movie—“will inspire and horrify. For its subject is an act of revenge that goes to the very heart of the ancient biblical questions of good and evil, or right and wrong, which ultimately remain the deepest concerns of the Jewish people and which continue to haunt ‘Avner’ and his comrades on their mission.”

But the book’s mysterious “Avner”—who was the movie’s leader of the hit team—had never worked for Mossad, let alone been selected to be a member of kidon. Even before Meir Dagan settled down for a private viewing of Munich, he knew that other members of Mossad had trashed the movie. David Kimche, the former deputy director, had castigated it “as a tragedy that a person of the stature of Steven Spielberg, who has made such fantastic films, should now have based ‘Munich’ on a book that is a falsehood.” Avi Dichter, a former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence service, had dismissed the film as “a children’s adventure story.” From all over the world other retired members of Mossad had joined in the criticism.

In the film the kidon are portrayed as increasingly filled with doubts about the morality of the mission. Conversely the terrorists are given a platform to rationalize their murders, just as the apologists for suicide bombers today defend their atrocities. All this was done with the consummate skill of a great filmmaker. What angered the real-life members of the hit team, together with current members of kidon , was that like the book, the movie did not explain Israel’s well-established justification for hunting down and executing terrorists who cannot be brought to trial by the usual means of arrest. In the movie the hit team is depicted as being isolated in the field for months. Two of its members are a forger and a bombmaker.

Rafi Eitan, the former Mossad operations chief who had played an important role in tracking down the Black September group, told the author: “It would have been unthinkable to expect a forger to produce documents under high-stress operational conditions. All the paperwork for the real operation was produced by Mossad’s forgery department. There was no bomb maker as such on the team. The explosives were created in Tel Aviv and brought to the team in the field. The movie team did not include a woman. Yet female kidon have always been part of a hit squad. Having them there helps to get closer to a target. But where the film went totally wrong was the hit team members questioning the morality of their actions. It never happened. It could never happen. The real hit team chosen for the mission were hand-picked for their mental stability. Like all kidon , they had undergone intense evaluation by Mossad psychologists. At the mission’s conclusion, they were debriefed by the psychologists. The team showed not the slightest sign of personality disorders. For them it had been a mission that was legally supported by the State of Israel.”

But Dagan wanted to judge for himself. He brought with him to the private viewing men who had been directly involved in the operational planning and execution of the Black September killers. His verdict at the end of the 145-minute movie was succinct: “Entertainment—maybe. Accurate—absolutely not.”

It was a review Dagan doubted would ever appear in any Spielberg filmography.

On Thursday, January 26, 2006, a day that came to be known in Israel as Black Thursday, Meir Dagan watched in mounting disbelief the images on the television screen in a corner of his office. The pictures switched from Gaza City to the West Bank, to Nablus and Bethlehem, from Ramallah to East Jerusalem, from one Arab township to another, from villages that were mere dots on the map on Dagan’s wall. Each image offered the same stunning sight of the green flag of Hamas raised in triumph. It fluttered from the minarets of mosques and the rooftops of buildings and moved through the streets in a great surge of green, held aloft by the chanting crowds. Hamas had won a sweeping, historic victory, one that had mocked all the pollsters, the foreign observers, and, most important for Dagan, the analysts of Mossad. How had everyone not foreseen what had happened? How had anyone not understood that Hamas had shown itself on poll day to be a disciplined organization able to turn out the faithful in huge numbers to vote? Why had no one discovered the preparation that had gone into creating the enormous green banners now being hung on public buildings? How had Hamas’s Qassam Brigades, its military wing, marching across the television screen, firing their guns in the air, their usual masks discarded, been so well rehearsed without attracting suspicion? These were questions being asked of Dagan by Israel’s Cabinet ministers. He had no ready answers. Not a man to rush to judgment, he continued to sit and watch, as did all Israel.

One certainty was clear. The peace talks would remain frozen. The reason was in the one statistic that ticker taped across the bottom of the television screens. Hamas had won 132 seats, leaving Fatah to cling to 43, and some of those by the slimmest of majorities, ending more than forty years of its domination of Palestinian life. Dagan would not quarrel with an Israeli radio commentator, who likened the victory to “an earthquake or tsunami.” It had changed for the foreseeable future Israel’s own relationship with the Palestinians and the Arab world beyond its borders. For better or worse? He did not know. He doubted if anyone in Israel could answer the question.

By that Thursday afternoon, Dagan was receiving the first calls from foreign intelligence service chiefs. They wanted to know how Hamas, a terrorist organization that had continuously undercut every step toward peace, a desire sought by moderate Palestinians, had managed to persuade such a majority of them to overwhelmingly vote for Hamas. And having done so, would they ensure that Hamas would now cease to attack Israel and try to create a real Palestinian state that would come to live side by side at peace with its Jewish neighbors?