Levi walked back to the office, sick at heart, wanting to talk to someone and also wanting to hide. The office was somber. Small groups of people talking quietly, secretaries staring blankly at their typewriters. I should do something, Levi thought. I shouldn’t sit and grieve. He went to the files and assembled a quick profile of the leaders of Black September. It was an offering to the vengeful God of Abraham and Isaac. He took it upstairs to the floor where the Chiefs had their offices. The reception desk was empty, so Levi walked down the hall until he reached the door of the deputy director, Avraham Cohen. The door was open. Cohen was sitting at his desk with his eyes closed. His head was bobbing slightly. Cohen was saying a prayer. On his arm, Levi saw, was a black armband.
Cohen raised his head eventually. His eyes were red and surrounded by dark circles.
“What do you want?” asked Cohen. The bark was gone from his voice.
“I thought this might be useful,” said Levi, handing him the file on the leaders of Black September.
“Do you know where these bastards are?”
“Some of them,” said Levi.
Cohen was silent. The bushy eyebrows, usually so animated, were at rest. Cohen was studying something on his desk, Levi noticed. It was a newspaper story listing the names of the eleven hostages-now the eleven victims-and brief biographies of each of them.
“This is the story of our people,” said Cohen.
“Yes,” said Levi. “I know.”
Cohen didn’t seem to hear him.
“Truly,” he said. “This is the story of Israel. Those boys in Munich were a map of who we are.”
“What do you mean?” asked Levi.
“Listen to me,” said Cohen, picking up the list from off his desk. “Let me tell you who these boys were. A wrestler who arrived in Israel just three months ago from the Soviet Union. Another wrestler from Russia. A riflery coach from Rumania. A weightlifter from Poland. A wrestling coach from Rumania. Can you listen to more? Eh? Do you want to hear more?”
“Yes,” said Levi.
“A weightlifter from America. A weightlifting coach from Poland. A weightlifter from Libya. A track coach from Tel Aviv. A fencing coach from Rumania. A wrestling coach from Germany, whose parents survived the Holocaust only to see their son die in Munich.”
Cohen put the list back on his desk. He put his head in his hands for a moment and then turned back to Levi.
“They are all from somewhere else, did you notice that? Eh? They came here to Israel to be safe and we let them down. You and I, the Institute. They trusted in us to keep them safe and we let them die like helpless Jews in Germany.”
“Yes.”
“And do you know what we should do about it?” asked Cohen, his voice rising, his eyebrows taking flight.
“No,” said Levi.
“We should kill the bastards! Every one of them.”
The next several days brought a flood of intelligence about the Munich incident. Much of it came across Levi’s desk. There were stacks of telephone and wireless intercepts, cables from every Israeli embassy in Europe, reports from agents and tipsters around the world about the Munich operation. The sheer volume of the material overwhelmed Levi. Somewhere in the mountain of paper there might be a message saying that the massacre had been planned by the president of Egypt himself, but it would take days to find it. The problem, Levi decided, wasn’t collecting intelligence. In the modern era of communications intercepts, that was easy. The problem was analyzing it in time to make a difference.
Much of what came in during those first few days was predictable and not very helpful. Black September had issued a four-page mimeographed statement in Cairo during the first few hours of the operation, declaring that the Israeli athletes were “under armed arrest” and explaining the conditions under which they would be freed. The Fatah leadership in Beirut issued a statement denying any responsibility for the Munich operation. Arab press reports generally condoned the massacre and said it was really Israel’s fault for oppressing the Palestinian people.
What struck Levi, as he began to sift through the intelligence, was how cleverly Black September had planned the operation. They had known exactly where to go in the Olympic Village to reach the Israeli quarters, how to penetrate the supposedly tight security, when to stage the attack for maximum surprise. They had managed to smuggle a small arsenal of weapons into West Germany undetected. They had been able to deliver precise demands in Cairo, several thousand miles away, shortly after the attack began. And they had, in the final moments at the airport, seen through the West German ruse and exacted a bloody price by killing all the hostages. Clearly, these were not amateurs.
The West German police provided the first good clue. They combed the employment records of all the companies and contractors that had worked on the Olympic Village, looking for the “inside man” who might have helped Black September. They soon discovered that one of the architects who had worked on the Olympic Village was a well-educated Palestinian. Levi ran his name and passport number through the computer and found that Mossad maintained a small file on him. He was a Fatah sympathizer, born in Haifa and educated in Europe. He had attracted Mossad attention because of a report that he had attended a meeting in 1971 with a Fatah intelligence officer. A man named Jamal Ramlawi.
Communications intercepts added more clues. The analysts in Unit 8200 noted unusually heavy wireless traffic between the Fatah headquarters in Beirut and a transmitter in East Berlin on the day of the Munich operation. The analysts were still trying to break the code and decipher the communications. But they already had a working hypothesis: East Berlin was the Fatah command post for the operation. Someone there had been running the show.
The Israelis asked the West Germans for permission to review the names of all Arab passport holders who had entered East Berlin from the West during the previous month. The list duly arrived on Levi’s desk. Among the hundreds of names and numbers, one caught Levi’s eye like a bright red flag. It was an Algerian passport, issued to someone named Chadli bin Yehiya. A quick check in the files confirmed that the same name and passport number had been used once before by Jamal Ramlawi.
Levi fed his intelligence reports to the Chiefs, who were holding daily meetings to plan their response to Munich. They gathered now, not in a sunny conference room on the way to Herzliya, but in a dark command bunker under the streets of Tel Aviv. In the dark, they were preparing to fight a war in the shadows.
Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, was celebrated three days after the Munich massacre. It was the end of the 5,732nd year of the Jewish people. “Who will live and who will die?” asked the traditional Rosh Hashana prayer. “Who by fire, who by sword?” The president of Israel issued a new year’s message to mark the beginning of year 5733. He spoke of the tragedy in Munich. “To the conscience of the world, we cry: ‘Let there be no rest till this evil arm is cut off!’ To the bereaved-parents and wives and children, friends and colleagues-we say: ‘The wounded hearts of all the nation feel with you. How shall we comfort you?’ ”
The Knesset delivered a simple answer when it met a week after Munich. Revenge.
The Israeli parliament passed a resolution declaring the terrorists “enemies of humanity” and vowing to “act with perseverance against the terrorist organizations, their bases and those who aid them, until an end is put to this criminal activity.” The meaning of that opaque language was hinted at in a dispatch by the military correspondent of The Jerusalem Post, who wrote: “Israel is expected to meet the terrorists on their own terrain in order to combat the rising wave of terror, using tactics which will be both unconventional and damaging.”