Sound and Fury by Dave Kindred

Author:Dave Kindred
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

If intimations of mortality first came in whispers to Cosell, in the fall of the year they came as shoutings. In Munich, Germany, at seven o’clock on the morning of September 5, 1972, he opened his hotel room door to admit Harris Curtis, an ABC radio engineer assigned to tape Cosell’s shows during the Olympic Games. Curtis asked, “Did you hear the news?”

“No, what?”

“Arab commandos got into the Village, took over the Israeli building, shot some of them dead, and are holding the rest hostage.”

In Germany, Jews dying again.

Even as Roone Arledge left the Olympic Broadcast Center at four-twenty that morning, eight men walked outside the fence surrounding the nearby Olympic Village. In duffel bags hidden under athletic gear, the men carried Kalashnikov machine guns and hand grenades. Athletes from all countries had made a habit of pulling themselves over the chain-link fence around the Village rather than walking to a guarded entrance. On this morning, the eight men joined Americans returning from a night out. As everyone scaled the fence, the Americans gave the strangers a hand hefting their bags over the top. Once inside, the eight moved through the darkness to the Village’s main street, Connollystrasse. On that street, in Building 31, lived athletes and officials from Israel.

One Israeli, Yossef Gutfreund, came awake at the sound of scratching at the apartment’s ground-floor door. As he reached the door, it opened. Gutfreund saw gun barrels and shouted, “Have tistalku!” Take cover! At 4:47 A.M ., a cleaning woman reported hearing gunfire. Within minutes, two Israelis had been murdered and nine taken hostage. A body was rolled into the street outside the apartment.

At 5:08 A.M ., two sheets of paper floated down from the balcony at 31 Connollystrasse. They settled into the hands of a German policeman. They carried the demands of Black September, a violent faction of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization. The demands included the release of 234 Palestinian prisoners and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, leaders of Germany’s infamous urban guerrillas, the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Failing their release by 9:00 A.M ., the Black September leader, Luttif Afif, known as “Issa,” told the police, one hostage would be shot every hour thereafter.

By eight-thirty, Cosell gained entry to the Village by persuading a guard that he was a Puma shoe salesmen. Immediately, Cosell felt a dissonance. As on any morning, athletes moved casually along Village walks, carefree, laughing, hard rock music rattling the air, all of it at odds with reality. From ABC’s European correspondent, Peter Jennings, Cosell learned details. Then he put himself across the street from Building 31, near an underpass that became a meeting place for police. By walkietalkie, he told Arledge in ABC’s headquarters, “More cars pulling up beneath the underpass…police getting out…submachine guns and pistols plainly visible.”

The American newspapermen Shirley Povich of the Washington Post and Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times, once at the gate with Cosell and using his debate with the guard as diversion, had found another way into the Village.

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