One Day in September by Simon Reeve

Author:Simon Reeve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

9

Operation Wrath of God

The small group of senior Israeli politicians and officials in charge of the assassination campaign against the terrorists involved in the Munich massacre was given the code name “Committee X.”1 It was a suitably dramatic title for a select cabal unknown even to other senior figures in the Israeli establishment.

General Aharon Yariv, one of the original proponents of the campaign, was appointed to the new post of “Prime Minister’s Adviser on Counterterrorism,” with a role as general overseer of the campaign. His instructions, agreed to by Meir, were to “put the fear of God” into the Palestinians. Those targeted for assassination were not just to be killed, they were to be hit dramatically. It was not enough simply to shoot them all down in the street; the Israeli agents had to use a degree of imagination in the assassinations to sow fear within Palestinian ranks.

Yariv was a strange choice for the role of avenger. A cerebral and mild man, born in Moscow in 1920, he emigrated to Palestine in 1935 when the “Jewish homeland” was still under British mandate.2 In 1941 he joined the British army, rose to the rank of captain, and then joined militant Zionist groups in 1946. By 1957 he was the Israeli military attaché in Washington, rising to become the director of military intelligence in 1964. He proved to be an intelligence genius, and Meir had absolute faith in his abilities.

The plan Committee X devised was for Israeli secret agents, principally from Mossad, to conduct the killings using “all kinds of means.” According to Yariv: “It could be by booby-trapping, could be by shooting, could be by blowing up a car. All these well-known methods.”3

The revenge operation was to be clinical and international in scope. Agents of Mossad were to kill the terrorists “wherever we could find them, and wherever our people could do this damn job,” Yariv has confirmed.

Few modern democratic states have dared to establish licensed assassination squads to eliminate their enemies, far fewer with the full agreement of the country’s leader, but Yariv believes that after Munich the Israeli government had no alternative: “ We had to make them stop, and there was no other way … We are not very proud about it. But it was a question of sheer necessity. We went back to the old biblical rule of an eye for an eye.”

With the assault in Munich, the Palestinians had changed the rules of the conflict and the Israelis would adapt with speed. Yariv explained: “I approach these problems not from a moral point of view but, hard as it may sound, from a cost-benefit point of view. If I’m very hard-headed, I can say, what is the political benefit in killing this person? Will it bring us nearer to peace? Will it bring us nearer to an understanding with the Palestinians or not? In most cases I don’t think it will. But in the case of Black September we had no other choice and it worked. Is it morally acceptable? One can debate that question.

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