Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [103]
As if this enormity were not enough, Black September was plotting its most spectacular attack. The pretext was that the International Olympic Committee had brusquely ignored a request from the Palestinians to be represented in September 1972 at the Munich Games. More relevant was possibly the presence of some six thousand print, radio and television journalists, with the first live satellite broadcasts - the US media pioneered this in 1968 - capable of reaching audiences of billions. A huge television tower would ensure that the world watched as sports commentators found themselves spectators at a massacre, with both commentators and terrorists having a vested interest in the telling detail and the longevity of the unfolding drama. The modern dialectic of commentators, studio-based experts and terrorists had come of age.
The projected attack, on a small Israeli team consisting mainly of fencers, weightlifters and wrestlers, was plotted by leading figures in Fatah and Black September, namely Abu Iyad, Abu Daoud, Fuad al-Shamali, and Ali Hassan Salameh. ‘We have to kill their most important and most famous people. Since we cannot come close to their statesmen, we have to kill artists and sportsmen,’ in the words of Fuad al-Shamali, the Lebanese Christian who plotted the Munich attack before his death in August 1972 from cancer. These men selected the two leaders of the attacking terrorist team, while the latter in turn selected six accomplices from a pool of men put through specialist training somewhere in Lebanon. These six then received intensified training, especially in jumping from high walls, at an Egyptian secret police facility near Cairo. Insofar as these men had any common profile it was that they had grown up in the Chatila refugee camp in Beirut and four, including the team leader Luttif Afif, code-named ‘Issa’, had studied or worked in Germany. One had worked on the construction of the Olympic Village; another had been a cook or waiter in one of the canteens; a third had a German wife.
Their weapons arrived in Germany in late August 1972. Abu Iyad shepherded a well-dressed middle-aged Arab couple through Frankfurt airport. A customs officer stopped them and asked to inspect their suitcases, much to the annoyance of the supposed businessman, who protested loudly. The first and only case he opened revealed piles of women’s underwear which in turn triggered voluble protests from the man’s wife. The customs officer waved them through. The other two cases contained grenades, pistols and eight AK-47 Kalashnikovs. Abu Daoud met the group and helped store the weapons in lockers at Munich’s railway station; he then waited for the attacks in his hotel room. Ali Hassan Salameh flew to East Berlin to watch the discomfort of the Federal Republic unfold from the safe haven of its Marxist-Leninist rival.
The full terrorist team met for the first time at a restaurant in Munich station on the eve of the attack. It was code-named ‘Ikrit and Birim’ in honour of two Maronite villages that the Israelis had destroyed in 1948. It commenced at 4.30 a.m. on 5 September when eight Palestinians, wearing tracksuits and carrying heavy sports bags, sauntered towards the fence surrounding the Olympic Village. A group of drunken Americans returning from a party obligingly helped