How Mossad’s Future PM Dressed as a Woman to Kill 3 PLO Leaders in One Night
They wanted them gone and they got what they wanted.
During the original siege in Munich, the terrorist leader Ludif Aif had told his German negotiators something chilling.
He said, “There is nothing to fear.
There is no death penalty in Germany and our brothers will liberate us.
” He was right.
He died at the airfield.
But his prediction came true.
When the news reaches Jerusalem, Prime Minister Gold Mayor addresses the nation.
Her voice is steady, but her words carry the weight of something irreversible.
She says, “We have been depressed since yesterday, agrieved and I would say insulted that the human spirit, so weak and helpless, has surrendered to brutal force.
Here is a question I want you to think about.
54 days after 11 of your people are murdered at the Olympics, the country responsible for the failed rescue not only sets the killers free, but may have paid terrorists to create a fake hijacking to justify it.
” Do you think Israel was justified in what it did next? Or did they cross a line that should never be crossed? Drop your answer in the comments.
That because what happens next will test everything you believe about justice and revenge? Behind closed doors in Tel Aviv, Goldmir makes a decision that will reshape the rules of international intelligence for the next 50 years.
She forms a secret committee.
No public announcement, no parliamentary debate, no paper trail, just four people.
herself, Defense Minister Mosha Dian, and two other senior officials with deep ties to Israeli security.
They call themselves Committee X.
Their mandate is simple.
Mossad presents names.
Committee X reviews the evidence and then one by one they authorize the killing of every single person connected to the Munich massacre.
Not a trial, not an arrest, not an extradition request, an execution.
The operation is given a code name drawn from scripture.
MVsa zahamal operation wroth of God.
The hit squad assembled to carry it out is cenamed Bayonet.
MSAD director Zamir overseas from Tel Aviv.
The field commander is a man named Michael Harrari, one of the most experienced operatives in Israeli intelligence.
According to one account, before each assassination, the target’s family receives a bouquet of flowers.
Attached is a small card.
The message is always the same.
A reminder we do not forget or forgive.
The kill list is compiled.
The names are distributed.
And across Europe, MSAD agents begin to move.
But here is what makes this operation different from almost anything that came before it.
Mossad is not working alone.
A secret intelligence sharing network called the club debour, a coalition of European spy agencies from France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and others is quietly feeding Mossad information, locations, movements, associates, travel patterns.
Publicly, these governments will condemn every killing.
Privately, they are handing Israel the addresses.
The hunters are moving.
And the first name on the list belongs to a poet living in Rome.
It is the evening of October 16th, 1972.
Wales Vider finishes his work at the Libyan embassy in Rome, walks to a nearby bar, and has a single drink.
He is a quiet man, a translator working on an Italian edition of 1,01 nights.
He is Yaser Arafat’s cousin, but by all accounts, he is a man of literature, not violence.
He boards a bus home to his apartment at Piaza Annabelliano.
What Zider does not know is that German intelligence linked his name to the Munich attackers within a week of the massacre.
That’s what he does not know is that Committee X reviewed the file and gave the order.
What he does not know is that two men have been waiting in the lobby of his apartment building for hours.
He walks through the front door.
The lobby is dim.
He reaches for the elevator button.
11 shots, one for each Israeli athlete who died in Munich.
The symbolism is deliberate.
Zider collapses in the lobby of his own building.
The two agents walk out into the Roman knight and vanish into a waiting car.
His friend Mahmud Hamshari, the PLO representative in Paris, travels to Rome for the funeral.
Afterward, he tells the other mourers something that silences the room.
He says, “I’m next on the list.
” He was right.
Two months pass.
The flowers arrive again in Paris.
Mahmud Hamshari lives in a modest apartment.
Eihay is the PLO’s representative in France.
A literary man, educated, softspoken.
He spends his days writing, meeting journalists, attending cultural events.
He is not a soldier, but his name is on the list.
And Mossad has already sent someone to find him.
Her name, at least the name she’s using, is Patricia Roxburg.
She carries a Canadian passport.
She says she is a photographer.
She is warm, curious, easy to talk to.
In reality, her name is Sylvia Raphael, and she is one of Mossad’s most skilled operatives.
She arranges a telephone interview with Hamshari.
They set a date and time.
He agrees.
He has no reason to be suspicious.
Journalists call him all the time.
While Hamshari is out of his apartment, a second team moves in.
They work quickly and silently.
Inside the base of his telephone, they place a small explosive device.
Then they leave.
Everything looks exactly as it did before.
On December 8th, 1972, the phone rings at the scheduled time.
Hamshari picks it up.
A voice on the other end confirms his identity.
Is this Mahmud Hamshari? Yes, he says.
The device is activated remotely.
The explosion tears through the apartment.
Hamshari survives the initial blast, but his injuries are catastrophic.
He dies in a hospital weeks later.
He had predicted his own death at his friend’s funeral, and he had been right down to the method.
Someone came to him as a friend first.
Now the pace quickens.
Msad is gaining confidence.
Each operation teaches them something.
Each success makes the next one faster.
In January 1973, Hussein Alche, a Fata operative who serves as liaison with the KGB, checks into a hotel in Nicoia and Cyprus.
He does not check the underside of his bed.
A concealed device detonates while he sleeps.
He does not survive.
In April, Basil al-Kubisi, an Iraqi law professor with ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is walking along a street in Paris.
Two men approach.
The encounter lasts seconds.
He falls on the sidewalk.
A few days later in Athens, Zahed Muchasi, the man who replaced Alchir as Fata’s contact with Soviet intelligence, enters his hotel room.
He too is not checked beneath the furniture.
The result is the same.
And then in late June 1973, Muhammad Buddha, an Algerian-born operative suspected of coordinating Black September’s European network, climbs into his Renault on a Paris street.
When he turns the key, a device beneath the driver’s seat detonates, the car is destroyed as Budia is killed instantly.
Six names, six countries, six months.
Rome, Paris, Nikosia, Paris again, Athens, Paris once more.
Every single time the agents vanish.
No fingerprints, no witnesses, no one is caught.
European intelligence agencies pass cables to each other asking who could be behind these killings.
While at least some of them already know the answer, the absurdity of it is almost theatrical.
The club to burn members help investigate murders that one of their own members committed.
They are looking for themselves.
But Mossad is not satisfied with picking off operatives one at a time in European capitals.
Three of the most important names on the list live in a place where lone gunmen and telephone bombs will not work.
They live in Beirut in heavily guarded apartment buildings surrounded by armed PLO fighters.
In a city that functions as the deacto capital of Palestinian resistance.
Getting to them requires something far more dangerous than anything Mossad has attempted before.
It requires an invasion.
The targets are Muhammad Yusf al- Najar, the operations leader of Black September, Kamal Adwan, the PLO’s chief of operations, and Kamal Nasser, a senior PLO spokesman and executive committee member.
All three live in a fashionable neighborhood called Verdun in West Beirut.
Their buildings are residential.
British families, Italian families, and Arab families all live in the same blocks.
Armed guards patrol the lobbies.
The streets are watched.
In February 1973, a young lieutenant colonel named Ahoud Barack, commander of Israel’s most elite special forces unit, and Sireate Matkall receives detailed intelligence on all three men, photographs, floor plans, exact apartment numbers, architectural blueprints of the buildings.
The information is extraordinary in its precision.
He immediately begins planning.
His plan is audacious to the point of absurdity.
Israeli Navy missile boats will sail 7 hours south from Hifa.
Under cover of darkness, commandos will launch from the boats in Zodiac, inflatable speedboats.
They will land on a private beach outside Beirut.
Mossad agents already in the city will be waiting in rented American luxury cars.
The commandos will be driven to Verdun, enter the buildings, eliminate the targets, and drive back to the beach.
in and out under 30 minutes.
There is one additional detail to avoid suspicion walking through Beirut streets at night and some of the commandos will be disguised as women including Barack himself.
They practice for weeks in apartment buildings in northern Tel Aviv, chosen because they resemble the Beirut targets.
The teams rehearse breaching doors, clearing rooms, and perhaps the strangest training any commando unit has ever undergone, walking in high heels.
They practice crossdressing.
They practice walking arm in-armm as couples.
The brunette wig is Baracks.
The chestnut wig goes to his deputy, Amir Lavine.
On the night of April 9th, 1973, the missile boats depart Hifa.
Seven hours later, off the coast of Beirut, the Zodiacs are lowered into the water.
The commandos climb aboard in full gear.
Engines cut a few hundred meters from shore.
They row the rest of the way in silence.
Here is a detail that sounds invented but is not.
Name, when the boats reach the shallows, the Shy 13 naval commandos, the men driving the Zodiacs, physically carry the cross-dressed raiders ashore on their backs, piggyback rides.
Because if the commandos wade through the water, the makeup will smear, the wigs will get wet, and the disguises will be ruined before the mission even begins.
They reach the beach.
Three cars are waiting.
Keys in the ignition, engines running.
The Mossad drivers know Beirut streets the way cab drivers do.
They floor it.
The cars screech to a halt near the target buildings.
The couples step out arm in arm and walk toward the entrances.
It is past midnight.
The PLO guards who were supposed to be watching the lobbies have fallen asleep in their parked cars.
Nobody stops them.
Three commando teams enter the buildings simultaneously.
These they plant explosive breaching charges on the apartment doors of their targets.
Then they radio Barack who waits outside with a backup team.
Three clicks on the radio.
All three teams are in position.
Barack responds with five clicks.
Execute.
The charges blow the doors open.
The commandos storm the apartments with automatic weapons.
Al-Nar runs from his bedroom and locks himself in another room.
They fire through the door.
He is killed.
His wife is also killed.
Kamal Adwan is shot in the hallway between bedrooms.
His wife watching from the bedroom later recalled hearing an Israeli voice say into a radio in Hebrew, “Mission accomplished.
His wife and children are here.
Should we kill them too?” The reply comes back.
If they don’t resist, don’t kill them.
Kamal Nasser is killed in his apartment.
Then everything goes sideways for exactly 90 seconds.
A PLO guard wakes up, steps out of his car with a pistol drawn.
Barack and Lavine fire.
One bullet hits the car horn.
It blares into the night, waking the entire neighborhood.
Within moments, Lebanese police flood the streets.
A firefight erupts.
Dozens of Jean Darmms close in on the Israeli backup team.
One of the commandos throws a grenade at an approaching police jeep.
Three of the four men inside are killed.
The Mossad cars roar up to the buildings.
The commandos pile in.
As they speed toward the beach, they throw road spikes behind them, shredding the tires of every vehicle in pursuit.
They reach the beach, abandon the cars, board the Zodiacs.
By the time the Lebanese military arrives at the shoreline and begins scanning the water, e the Israelis are already motoring toward the missile boats waiting in the dark Mediterranean.
8 minutes inside the buildings, 30 minutes on Lebanese soil.
Three of the PLO’s most senior leaders are dead.
When Ehood Barak arrives home, his wife Nava meets him at the door.
She looks at him.
Something is wrong.
She stares at his face and asks why he has blue eyeshadow on.
He tries to dodge the question.
She opens his suitcase.
A woman’s jacket falls out.
He tells her nothing.
He is exhausted.
He goes to sleep.
In Beirut, over 100,000 people attend the funeral of the three leaders.
Yaser Arafat weeps publicly.
The Lebanese prime minister resigns the following day.
And across the Arab world, a single terrible realization sets in.
Nowhere is safe.
If Israel can reach you in the heart of Beirut dressed as a woman and on a Tuesday night they can reach you anywhere.
Mossad is untouchable.
Or so it seems.
Because in July 1973, the machine that has operated with surgical precision for 10 months is about to make a mistake so catastrophic that it will nearly destroy everything.
The primary target, the one name that matters more than all the others combined, is still alive.
Ali Hassan Salame, the Red Prince, the man Mossad believes masterminded the Munich massacre.
He is the operational chief of Black September, the founder of Force 17, Yaser Arafat’s most trusted lieutenant.
[music] He is wealthy, charismatic, fearless, and impossibly wellprotected.
Killing him would be the crown jewel of the entire operation.
In the summer of 1973, Msad receives a tip.
Salame is in Scandinavia.
Specifically, I hei is living under a false identity in the quiet Norwegian ski town of Lilah Hammer, a place so peaceful it has not seen a single murder in 36 years.
15 agents deployed to Lilahhammer.
They follow a lead.
An Algerian man named Kamal Benamanet has been tracked from Geneva to Oslo to this tiny town.
In Lillah, Benamanet meets twice with a local man, a waiter at a restaurant.
Mossad leadership in Tel Aviv is convinced this waiter is the Red Prince.
He must be living in deep cover.
The agents on the ground are not so sure.
Dan Arbell, one of the team members, will later say, “I told them very clearly.
It wasn’t him.
” But Mike was sure.
He had gotten a tip off.
It was as if he said, “I know better and you know nothing.
” Mike is Michael Harrari, the field commander of the entire Wrath of God operation.
And on the evening of July 21st, the man leaves a movie theater with a woman.
She is blonde.
She is Norwegian.
She is pregnant.
They walk toward their apartment building.
They look like any other couple on a summer evening in a small town.
A gray Volvo pulls up.
Two men step out.
They fire at close range.
The man falls.
The woman screams.
His name is Ahmed Buchiki.
He is 30 years old.
He is a Moroccan-born waiter.
He cleans the town swimming pool on weekends.
He has never been to the Middle East.
He has never met a member of Black September.
He has never held a weapon.
His only connection to the Arab world is his name.
He is the wrong man.
The pregnant woman standing over his body will later give birth to a daughter who will grow up without a father.
Killed by mistake in a Norwegian parking lot by agents from a country she had never thought about.
And then the escape falls apart completely.
The agents shaken, make errors that firstear intelligence recruits would not make.
They use the same rental car they arrived in.
They do not change the license plates.
Two agents are stopped at the airport the next morning and arrested.
[music] Under interrogation, Dan Arbell, who suffers from severe claustrophobia, is placed in a small cell.
He breaks almost immediately.
In exchange for a larger room with a window, he gives the Norwegians everything: names, operations, structures, phone numbers.
Police find a key on one of the agents.
It opens a Mossad safe house in Paris.
All French police raid it.
Inside, they find keys to more safe houses.
Documents linking agents to previous operations.
The entire European infrastructure of Operation Wrath of God begins to unravel like a pulled thread.
Six agents are tried, five are convicted.
The sentences are shockingly lenient, but the damage is total.
From her prison cell in Norway, Sylvia Raphael, the same woman who posed as a Canadian photographer to get close to Hamshari in Paris, writes a letter to a fellow agent.
She says, “Something in me broke after Lilyhammer.
It eroded my desire to continue serving with the people I respected so highly.
The international outcry is deafening.
Gold mayor, besieged from every direction, makes a decision that feels like surrender.
She suspends Operation Roth of God.
Mossad director Zevi Zamir offers his resignation.
The mayor refuses it.
There is too much at stake and the Yom Kipur war is weeks away.
The kill list is shelved.
The agents are recalled.
The safe houses are abandoned.
And somewhere in Beirut, Ali Hassan Salame reads the headlines and smiles.
The Red Prince is alive.
He is free.
He is untouchable.
And he plans to stay that way.
What Mossad does not know yet, what nobody outside the CIA knows, is that Ali Hassan Salame has a protector.
And it is the last country anyone in Tel Aviv would suspect, the United States of America.
Throughout the early and mid 1970s, the CIA is running a secret back channel to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The contact man, the gobetween, the one person who makes the dialogue possible is Ali Hassan Salame.
In exchange for keeping this channel open, as Salame has made a promise to the Americans, no PLO operations will target US citizens.
And he delivers.
During the chaos of the Lebanese civil war, when Beirut is a war zone and Western embassies are under constant threat, it is Salame who personally guarantees the safety of Americans in the city.
A CIA officer meets him regularly in Beirut.
Years later, the officer will describe their relationship with a cander that borders on the absurd.
He will say, “He knew that I knew who he was, what he had done, so why bring it up?” Certain things, he explains, go unsaid.
The CIA feeds Salame dozens of warnings about Mossad assassination attempts.
They give him encrypted communications equipment.
At one point, they even consider sending him an armored vehicle.
In Alali Hassan Salame, the man Israel believes planned the murder of 11 Olympic athletes, is being protected by America’s intelligence agency because he is useful and Salame knows it.
He does not hide.
He does not run.
He does the opposite.
In 1974, Salami walks into the United Nations headquarters in New York City, right behind Yaser Arafod.
He does it openly in front of cameras.
Israeli intelligence is watching.
They can do nothing.
He is on American soil under American protection.
And he knows exactly how untouchable that makes him.
His lifestyle matches his confidence.
He drives expensive cars through the streets of Beirut.
He throws lavish parties.
He is surrounded by women.
Young Palestinians idolize him.
His nickname, the Red Prince, is not just a code name.
It is a description.
He lives like royalty.
And then he does something that would seem impossible for a man on Msad’s kill list.
In 1978, he marries Georgina Risk, the Lebanese beauty queen who was crowned Miss Universe in 1971.
Their honeymoon takes them to Hawaii.
And then as if to prove some private point about invincibility, they visit Disneyland.
Mossad has not forgotten him.
They have tried and failed Ren to reach him multiple times since Lilah hammer.
In London, a Kaidon assassination team closes in on Salame as he leaves a building.
But his bodyguards are not the only ones watching.
CIA operatives, intoxicated, some accounts say, physically step into the path of the Israeli agents, blocking their approach.
Salame escapes in a taxi.
The Americans have intervened directly.
In Scandinavia, another team tracks Salama to a church.
It three Arab men are found inside.
The agents demand identification.
One of the men reaches towards something.
All three are shot.
But when the bodies are identified, Salame is not among them.
He was never there.
In Tarifa, on the southern coast of Spain, a team of three agents approaches a beach house where intelligence places Salameé during a night gathering.
An armed Arab security guard spots them and raises a rifle.
He is shot.
The operation collapses.
The team escapes to a safe house.
Salame is untouched.
After Lily Hammer, after Golden Mayor’s suspension order, after the failed London attempt and the bodies in the church and the firefight in Spain, any rational intelligence agency might decide this target is simply too well protected, too connected, too dangerous to pursue.
Mossad is not a rational agency.
Not when it comes to Munich.
Yet, in 1974, they send a single agent to Beirut.
He carries a false identity, a cover story, and one standing order.
live in the city.
Observe Ali Hassan Salame.
Report his movements.
Under no circumstances make contact with the target.
His code name will never be declassified.
He is known only as Agent D.
Agent D checks into the Beirut International Hotel.
Salame is known to work out at the hotel gym.
Agent D’s job is simple.
Train at the gym.
Watch from a distance.
Map the routine.
Stay invisible.
For 6 months, he does exactly that.
He watches Salame arrive, watches him lift weights, watches him leave.
He memorizes the schedule, the cars, the bodyguards, the routes.
He sends reports to Tel Aviv.
He speaks to no one.
And then one afternoon, while Agent D is doing abdominal exercises alone in the gym, a voice comes from behind him.
You’re not doing it right, my friend.
He turns [music] around.
Ali Hassan Salame is standing behind him, smiling.
Salame shows him the correct technique.
They start talking.
Salame asks if he plays squash.
Agent D says he plays tennis.
They begin to spend time together.
And over the following months, the man Mossad sent to watch Ali Hassan Salame from a safe distance becomes one of Ali Hassan Salame’s closest friends.
Agent D maps everything.
Not from a hotel lobby or a parked car, but from inside Salame’s inner circle.
He knows what time Salame wakes up, where he eats lunch, which gym sessions he skips, which streets his convoy takes, which afternoons he spends with his wife.
He feeds every detail back to Tel Aviv through encrypted channels.
The patient architecture of an assassination takes shape and one gym session at a time.
In October 1978, a second agent arrives in Beirut, a woman.
She carries a British passport under the name Erica Chambers.
She tells everyone she works for a charity supporting Palestinian orphans.
She rents an apartment on Ru Verdon.
Around the corner from where Salameé stays when he visits his wife, Georgina Risk Chambers settles in.
She rescues stray cats.
She sets up an easel on her balcony and paints street scenes of Beirut.
She is quiet, friendly, eccentric in the way the British sometimes are.
The neighbors like her.
She attends charity functions.
At one of these events, she meets Salame himself.
He takes a liking to her.
He brings her along to social gatherings.
He has no idea that the English woman with the paintbrush is mapping his daily movements with the same precision as Agent D.
For 6 weeks, the Mossad team observes.
Salame spends most afternoons with Risk at her apartment in the Snubra district of West Beirut.
He works out at the gym, visits the sauna, attends meetings.
His convoy, always two Chevrolet station wagons, always four bodyguards, follows the same roots.
An initial plan to place a device at the sauna is considered and rejected.
Too many civilians.
The risk of collateral damage is too high.
A different approach is chosen.
Mossad acquires a red Volkswagen.
In the trunk, they pack roughly 100 kg of explosives.
The car is parked on Ru Verdun, directly below Erica Chambers balcony apartment along the route Salame’s convoy takes every afternoon and they wait.
January 22nd, 1979.
It is a Monday afternoon.
The sun is bright and Erica Chambers is on her balcony painting.
Below her, the red Volkswagen sits against the curb.
It has been there for days, unremarkable, invisible.
At 3:35, two Chevrolet station wagons round the corner from Ru Verdon onto Ru Madame Curi.
Inside the lead car, Ali Hassan Salame sits surrounded by four bodyguards.
He is in a good mood.
He is heading to his mother’s apartment for a birthday party.
Georgina, 6 months pregnant with their son, is at home.
He has done this drive dozens of times.
The route is familiar.
The neighborhood is his.
The convoy passes the red Volkswagen.
On the balcony, Erica Chambers puts down her paintbrush.
She gives the signal.
100 kg of explosive detonates.
The blast rips through Salame’s vehicle with a force that shatters windows three blocks away.
All four bodyguards are killed instantly.
Salame is thrown forward, conscious, but destroyed.
Steel shrapnel embedded in his skull, his chest, his arms.
He is pulled from the wreckage and rushed to the American University Hospital.
At 4:03 in the afternoon, 28 minutes after the blast, Ali Hassan Salame dies on the operating table.
He is 37 years old.
The Red Prince never made it to the party.
But the blast did not kill only its target.
Four bystanders are dead, a British student, a German nun.
Two others who were simply walking down the street at the wrong moment.
18 more are wounded.
Among the survivors is a young woman who is doing nothing more dangerous than crossing the road.
Erica Chambers will be haunted by that woman for years.
And in one of the MSAD officers involved later admitted it plainly.
It would be plain dumb to say I didn’t take into account there would be collateral damage.
Within hours, the three primary MSAD officers vanish from Beirut.
Up to 14 other agents believed to be involved in the operation disappear along with them.
No arrests, no trails, no trace.
Two days later, roughly 20,000 Palestinians march in Salame’s funeral procession through the streets of Beirut.
Yaser Arafat walks at the front.
Months later, Georgina Risk gives birth to their son.
With the death of the Red Prince, Israel’s 7-year campaign of retribution is over.
Operation Wrath of God, born in the grief of Munich, authorized by a grandmother who became a prime minister.
A executed by poets who became assassins and soldiers who dressed as women reaches its end on a street corner in Beirut with the sound of a Volkswagen exploding and a paintbrush falling from a balcony railing.
But here is what sits beneath the surface of this story.
The question no one in Tel Aviv wanted to ask out loud.
Did they get the right people? Investigative journalist Aaron Klene spent years interviewing former MSAD officers.
His conclusion is uncomfortable.
Of all the people killed across Europe during Operation Roth of God, Klene argues that Mossad may have gotten only one man with a direct verified connection to the Munich massacre.
At Biso, who was killed in Paris in 1992, almost 20 years after the operation began.
The rest, he contends, on were minor PLO figures who happened to be living unprotected in European capitals.
They were visible, they were accessible, and they were killed because they could be reached.
Not necessarily because they pulled a trigger in Munich.
The real planners and executives of the massacre had gone into hiding.
Many fled to the eastern block and the Arab world where Israel could not touch them.
And the true mastermind, the man who conceived the entire Munich operation, who recruited the team, who planned every detail, was a man named Abu Dud.
Mossad never killed him.
He was briefly arrested in France in 1977, but was released within days after diplomatic pressure from multiple Arab states.
He walked free.
He lived the rest of his life between Damascus and the Palestinian territories.
He wrote a memoir.
He gave interviews in he died of kidney failure in 2010 in a hospital bed surrounded by his family.
He was 83 years old.
The three surviving Munich terrorists, the ones Germany set free after 54 days, their fates are fragments.
Jamal Algash disappeared.
Some reports place him in North Africa under a false name.
Adnan Algash reportedly died of heart failure, though the details are disputed.
Muhammad Safati was reportedly killed during the Lebanese civil war.
None of them were ever tried in a court of law.
Ehoud Barack, the lieutenant colonel who dressed as a brunette woman and walked arm in- arm through the streets of Beirut to kill three PLO leaders, went on to become the most decorated soldier in Israeli history.
He served as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces.
In 1999, he was elected prime minister of Israel.
Sylvia Raphael, the Mossad agent who posed as a Canadian photographer to set up the telephone operation in Paris, who was arrested and jailed in Norway after Liil Hammer, served her sentence and was released.
She married her Norwegian defense lawyer.
She lived quietly until her death in 2005.
The operation Israel called Wrath of God is believed to have continued intermittently for more than 20 years, though its core European campaign burned through 1972 and 73 with the final Salame operation closing the chapter in 1979.
In total, Mossad is believed to have killed at least 12 people across Europe and the Middle East.
An unknown number of others were killed in operations that remain classified.
A 900 million people watched the Munich massacre on live television and waited for justice.
11 families buried their athletes and waited for justice.
And when the world delivered the opposite, when Germany set the killers free, when the Olympics resumed after 34 hours, when the IOC president said the games must go on, Israel decided to deliver justice itself.
Whether what followed was justice or something else entirely depends on where you stand and maybe on whether you have ever sat in a room and been told that the people who murdered your son, your husband, your brother, your friend will never face a courtroom, will never face a jury, will walk free into the afternoon sun and disappear.
Gold Mayor made her choice.
Mossad carried it out and for seven years across three continents and through Rome and Paris and Beirut and Athens and Cyprus and Liilhammer, the men on that list lived with a truth that most people never have to confront.
That someone somewhere has already decided how and when [music] they will die.
Some of them deserve to be on that list.
Some of them almost certainly did not.
[music] And one of them, a Moroccan waiter who cleaned a swimming pool in Norway, was simply walking home from a movie with his pregnant wife on a summer evening when the future arrived in the form of a gray Volvo and two strangers with guns.
There are no clean hands in this story.
There is no side that walks away without blood on its conscience.
There is only a list of names, some guilty, some innocent, all of them dead, and a question that has no comfortable answer.
If you found this story worth telling, subscribe.
There are more MSAD operations the world was never supposed to hear about.
And if you have made it this far, I will leave you with one last thought to sit with.
Israel called this operation the wrath of God.
They believed they were delivering divine justice.
But after seven years, after wrong men killed and innocent bystanders shattered and agents broken in prison cells and a network burned to the ground in Norway, after all of it, the actual mastermind of Munich died of old age in a hospital bed holding his family’s hands.
The explosion on Rue Verdun did not just kill Ali Hassan Salame.
It changed the psychology of the Middle East overnight.
In Beirut, people stood beside shattered storefronts and twisted car frames trying to understand what had happened.
The blast crater looked like artillery fire.
Chunks of concrete hung from balconies above the street.
Glass covered the sidewalks like crushed ice.
Lebanese police pushed civilians back while PLO fighters screamed into radios and pointed rifles at every unfamiliar face they saw.
But the most terrifying realization came slowly.
The bomb had not been hidden in a battlefield.
It had not been planted in some remote compound.
It had been sitting openly on an ordinary civilian street in the middle of Beirut for days while nobody noticed.
That meant the people responsible had not just penetrated the city.
They had lived inside it.
And somewhere in Tel Aviv, Mossad officers were already closing folders, burning documents, and preparing final reports for a campaign that had consumed nearly seven years of blood, deception, and obsession.
Yet inside Israeli intelligence itself, there was no celebration.
Only exhaustion.
By 1979 many of the operatives involved in Wrath of God were psychologically frayed in ways they would never fully explain publicly.
Some had spent years living under false names in hostile cities.
Some had maintained romantic relationships as cover identities.
Some had watched innocent civilians die beside their targets.
Others had pulled triggers at point-blank range and then boarded commercial flights hours later pretending to be tourists returning home from vacation.
The mythology surrounding Mossad later turned these operations into something almost cinematic.
Precision.
Efficiency.
Cold professionalism.
The reality was uglier.
One operative later admitted that the hardest part was not killing.
It was returning to normal life afterward.
He described sitting in cafés reading newspapers while strangers at nearby tables discussed assassinations he himself had carried out days earlier.
They argued politics while he silently replayed the sound of gunfire in his head.
Another officer recalled walking through European airports after operations with his hands shaking so badly he could barely present his passport.
And underneath all of it sat an uncomfortable truth: the operation had changed Israel too.
Before Munich, targeted assassinations existed in the shadows of intelligence work.
After Munich, they became institutional doctrine.
Wrath of God helped establish the idea that Israel would pursue enemies across borders indefinitely, regardless of sovereignty, distance, or time elapsed.
Future operations against Hezbollah, Hamas, Iranian nuclear scientists, and countless others would all trace part of their operational DNA back to those seven years after the Olympics.
Munich became the template.
So did the moral ambiguity.
Because every success created a new argument inside Israeli leadership itself.
Did killing militants prevent future attacks?
Or did it guarantee endless cycles of retaliation?
There was evidence for both.
Black September as an organization effectively ceased to exist by the mid-1970s.
Several key operatives connected to Palestinian international terrorism were dead.
Some surviving figures went deeper underground.
Others became more cautious, more paranoid, less operationally effective.
But Palestinian militancy did not disappear.
It evolved.
Airline hijackings gave way to new forms of terrorism.
Urban bombings spread across Europe and the Middle East.
The Lebanese Civil War exploded into catastrophic violence.
The conflict widened, adapted, metastasized.
And even inside Mossad, some officers questioned whether Wrath of God had gradually transformed from justice into institutional momentum.
Once the machine began moving, stopping it became politically impossible.
Every new killing justified the next one.
Especially after Lillehammer.
The Norwegian fiasco left scars inside the agency that lasted for decades.
European governments that had quietly cooperated with Israeli intelligence suddenly became cautious.
Some were furious.
Others feared exposure of their own covert assistance.
Intelligence-sharing networks became strained.
Mossad safe houses across Europe were abandoned.
Operational methods were rewritten almost from scratch.
Most importantly, the illusion of perfection was shattered.
Until Lillehammer, Mossad had cultivated an almost supernatural reputation.
Newspapers described agents as ghosts capable of crossing any border, assuming any identity, eliminating any target.
But Ahmed Bouchiki’s death exposed something intelligence agencies rarely admit publicly.
Human beings make mistakes.
And when intelligence agencies make mistakes, innocent people die.
Bouchiki’s widow later described the sound of the gunfire echoing through the parking lot.
She said her husband looked confused more than frightened.
As if he could not understand why strangers were shooting him.
Because he truly had no idea.
His death became one of the defining moral indictments of the operation.
Not because civilians had never died before, but because his innocence was undeniable.
He was not collateral damage standing near a target.
He was the target.
Wrong place.
Wrong name.
Wrong life.
For years afterward, the phrase “another Lillehammer” haunted Mossad internal discussions whenever new assassination operations were proposed.
And yet despite the disaster, the agency never truly abandoned the philosophy behind Wrath of God.
Neither did the Israeli public.
For many Israelis, Munich represented more than terrorism.
It represented helplessness.
The image of Jewish athletes bound and murdered on German soil while the world watched on television triggered historical trauma that reached far beyond sports or geopolitics.
The Holocaust still lived in living memory.
Many Israelis saw the massacre not as an isolated attack, but as another reminder that Jews could not rely on international institutions for protection.
The Olympic Games resumed after 34 hours.
That fact burned itself into Israeli national consciousness.
Families of the victims never forgot it.
Some openly condemned the IOC for decades afterward.
Andre Spitzer’s widow, Ankie, became one of the most vocal advocates demanding full Olympic recognition for the murdered athletes.
She spent years fighting for an official moment of silence at the Games.
For a long time, the IOC resisted.
Too political, they argued.
As though the massacre itself had not already politicized the Olympics forever.
The bitterness endured across generations.
And meanwhile, many of the individuals involved in the operation moved into strange second lives.
Ehud Barak transitioned from commando raids into politics, eventually becoming prime minister.
Men who once crossed Beirut in wigs and makeup later negotiated treaties and addressed world leaders in tailored suits.
Others vanished into anonymity.
Some former operatives reportedly struggled with alcoholism.
Some divorced repeatedly.
Some refused interviews for the rest of their lives.
A few quietly admitted that after years of operating under false identities, they no longer felt entirely connected to their real ones.
One Mossad veteran later explained that deep-cover work damages something fundamental in people.
After years of lying professionally, manipulating friendships, inventing histories, and treating human relationships as operational tools, sincerity itself becomes difficult.
Trust becomes difficult.
Even ordinary conversation becomes performance.
And then there was Ali Hassan Salame himself.
In death, the Red Prince became larger than he had been alive.
To many Palestinians, he became a symbol of charisma, defiance, and resistance.
Posters bearing his image spread across Beirut.
Stories about him became half history, half mythology.
Tales of his elegance, his confidence, his survival of repeated assassination attempts turned him into something almost cinematic.
The irony was staggering.
Israel spent years trying to erase him.
Instead, they immortalized him.
And the CIA’s relationship with Salame would later become one of the most controversial covert relationships in American intelligence history.
When details emerged years later that the United States had maintained secret contacts with a man linked to Munich, outrage followed.
But inside the CIA, some officers defended the relationship pragmatically.
They argued that Beirut in the 1970s was one of the most dangerous intelligence environments on earth and that Salame had genuinely protected American lives.
That was the brutal arithmetic of espionage.
Governments routinely dealt with violent men because violent men controlled events.
Public morality and private statecraft often occupied entirely different universes.
The same contradiction existed everywhere in the story.
European governments condemned Israeli assassinations while quietly sharing intelligence.
The CIA protected a man linked to terrorism while denouncing terrorism publicly.
Israel condemned attacks on civilians while detonating bombs in crowded streets.
Palestinian factions condemned Israeli violence while targeting athletes at the Olympics.
Everybody justified themselves.
Everybody accused the other side of barbarism.
Everybody buried their dead.
And history kept moving.
In later years, surviving Mossad officers occasionally reflected on the operation with a mixture of pride and unease.
Some believed completely that the campaign was necessary.
Others admitted the line between justice and vengeance became blurred almost immediately.
One officer reportedly said the operation answered an emotional need more than a strategic one.
Israel needed to prove that Jewish blood could not be spilled without consequence.
Not symbolically.
Literally.
The message was intended not only for Palestinians, but for the entire world.
If you attacked Israelis, distance would not save you.
Time would not save you.
Borders would not save you.
That doctrine became central to Israeli counterterrorism philosophy for the next half century.
And yet the operation also revealed the limits of assassination itself.
You can kill individuals.
You cannot kill an idea with bullets.
Black September disappeared, but the Israeli-Palestinian conflict deepened.
Violence continued.
Retaliation produced retaliation.
Entire generations inherited wars they did not start.
Munich was not the end of something.
It was the beginning of an era.
An era where televised terrorism, international hostage crises, covert assassinations, and global intelligence warfare became permanent features of modern politics.
Before Munich, many governments still treated terrorism as isolated criminality.
After Munich, nations began restructuring intelligence services around counterterrorism entirely.
Germany created GSG 9 specifically because of the disaster at Furstenfeldbruck.
Airports around the world transformed security procedures.
Special operations units expanded globally.
Targeted killing programs became normalized in ways previously unimaginable.
In that sense, the shadows of September 1972 stretched far beyond Israel and Palestine.
Even today, modern counterterrorism strategies still carry echoes of decisions made in those rooms after Munich.
But perhaps the strangest thing about the entire story is how ordinary so many moments inside it were.
A woman painting on a balcony.
A waiter walking home from a movie.
Athletes laughing on a bus after seeing a musical.
A father telling his son to go sleep in another room.
A phone ringing in a Paris apartment.
A couple walking through Beirut arm in arm.
A man correcting another man’s workout posture in a gym.
History rarely announces itself while it is happening.
Most people inside these moments did not know they were stepping into something that would be studied for decades.
And maybe that is why the story endures.
Not because it offers moral clarity.
It does the opposite.
Every side can point to pain.
Every side can point to horror.
Every side can point to graves.
Munich created widows.
Wrath of God created widows too.
The Olympic athletes never received justice in any clean or complete sense.
Neither did the innocent people caught in the retaliation.
The masterminds were not all found.
The wrong men were sometimes killed.
Governments lied publicly while conspiring privately.
Intelligence agencies crossed lines they officially denied existed.
And still the dead remained dead.
In the end, perhaps the most haunting detail is not the explosions or the assassinations or even the massacre itself.
It is the image of those three surviving terrorists released after 54 days.
Because for many Israelis, that moment destroyed faith in the international system completely.
Courts failed.
Diplomacy failed.
Governments failed.
The world moved on.
So Israel decided it would never wait for the world again.
That decision shaped decades of history.
Whether it made the world safer or simply more brutal is a question historians still argue over.
But on certain afternoons in Beirut, when sunlight hits the balconies along Rue Verdun just right, older residents still remember the red Volkswagen parked quietly beneath an Englishwoman painting street scenes.
And they remember how ordinary it looked before the world exploded.
