On Striking Back, its author Aaron Klein, and Questioning Israeli Counterterrorism Policy

In September 1972, eleven Israeli Olympic athletes were bound, gagged, and held hostage in their own dormitories. The 1972 Munich Olympics were to be the Games of Peace and Joy – the first held on German soil since Hitler presided over the Games in 1936 – so the reporters and television cameras were already primed for action. When everything went horribly wrong, they had only to redirect their lenses at this different kind of spectacle, and suddenly, the whole world was watching. Aaron Klein, 12 at the time, watched from his family’s living room as his countrymen were marched to their death in Germany, less than thirty years after the Holocaust. Although he was only a boy, the significance of the event was not lost on Klein. “I remember scenes, pictures,” he says. “The hostages being taken from the bus to the helicopter. They are handcuffed. Their morale is shattered. It was a horrible situation.”

In the months and years following the events in Munich, Israel embarked on a systematic campaign to assassinate terrorists. Many who have written about the assassination campaign in the past have described a careful list of all of those thought to be involved in Munich. (Most notably, Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Munich, is based upon George Jonas’s 1984 book, Vengeance.) In these accounts, one by one, the guilty parties on the list are picked off. Not so, says Klein. “Like in the movie – ‘we’ll go, we’ll revenge, and come back home.’ This is a joke,” says Klein. “Nobody works like that. Nobody thinks like that.”

Klein’s new book, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response, is an inside look at the workings of the Mossad and the upper echelons of the Israeli government during this fraught time. Based on over 50 interviews with people at all levels of operation – “from the foot soldiers [to the] commanders,” Klein says – as well as Israeli archival material and a never-before-released report, the book is journalistically exacting but reads like a novel.

Klein offers harsh criticism of the Mossad and the Israeli government in the years following the terrorist attack that was to change the country’s history. He is a reporter, and he has a reporter’s eye for detail; in Striking Back, these details are used to devastating effect. One by one, Klein lines up Israel’s blunders, missteps, and less-than-kosher motivations during the birth of operations in what remains Israel’s largest military preoccupation: counter-terrorism. He seems to take particular delight in skewering Golda Meir, the prime minister who presided over most of the book’s action, and who is so beloved by Israelis that to many (Klein included) she is known simply as “Golda.” The Mossad myth – that Israel’s top intelligence organization makes no mistakes, is deadly accurate, and all-knowing – is painstakingly dismantled here. “The tone of the book is quite critical of Israel,” I observe. “Nachon,” he replies. But it’s easy to mistake criticism for disloyalty.
Let there be no mistake. Aaron Klein is a patriot. 

I meet Klein on a cold December day in New York. He is an imposing man, perhaps six feet tall with big hands and thoughtful green eyes. But he is also patient and polite, and has a professor’s careful way of explaining his ideas. Having read “Striking Back” and noted its unflinching criticism, I am quite surprised to hear Klein defend Israel at every turn. “We must understand the atmosphere at the time,” he says, explaining why Meir and the Mossad were willing to make sometimes fatal mistakes. “The Israeli state is under attack… they know at the time that they have very poor intelligence…So maybe Munich is the first in the row of 5. Or 10, or 15. They didn’t know.”

Prevention, deterrence, revenge. Klein builds his narrative around these three factors that come into play when a state chooses assassination from its wartime arsenal. Klein views prevention and deterrence as legitimate, if distasteful, reasons for assassination. Revenge, on the other hand, is dubious terrain. Certainly it is morally dubious, as he writes in the book: “Israel’s prestige would be tarnished if it became clear that the Jewish state had stooped to the level of its terrorist adversaries.” But to Klein, perhaps the more important reason that revenge is not an appropriate motivator is that it causes mistakes. The first assassination of the campaign, that of Palestinian poet and translator Wael Zu’aytir, is a prime example of the way in which revenge can cause otherwise careful people to act impulsively.

Where Jonas paints Zu’aytir as “one of the major organizers and coordinators of terrorism in Europe,” Klein writes that he was, “at best, a small fish in a pond full of sharks.” Klein continues, “looking back, his assassination was a mistake…But in the vengeance-laced atmosphere of September and October 1972…no one was in the mood to dispute it.” Being motivated by vengeance, says Klein, prevents the Mossad from doing its job correctly. And that is not acceptable. “The Mossad are representatives of the Israeli people,” he says. “I want them—as a citizen—to be cool-minded. I don’t want them to be motivated by revenge. I want them to be the best there is. When they assassinate someone, I want them to check it 200 times. Not one. Not two.”

Of the 16 people whose assassinations Klein describes, six were top-level terrorist operatives whose deaths demonstrably prevented terrorist attacks. The rest, if they were involved in terrorism at all, were low-level operatives. Perhaps they stored arms or hosted meetings at their homes. Perhaps they were simply big talkers with extremist views. One, Achmed Bouchiki, was killed by accident, mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Mossad’s top target. Bouchiki, a waiter in a sleepy Scandinavian town, was killed while walking down the street with his pregnant Norwegian wife.

This blunder, perhaps the Mossad’s biggest ever, cost an innocent man his life and sent five Mossad operatives to jail. Only one of the 16, Atef Bseiso, who wasn’t assassinated until 1992, was directly connected to the events at Munich. Top-level operatives known to have planned and facilitated the Munich attacks were largely too hard to reach; unguarded “small fish” were easier targets. Besides, Klein writes, the public was satisfied that the Mossad was doing something; the details were not important. “Sometimes decisions were made based on operational ease,” Klein quotes a senior Israeli intelligence officer as saying. “When there was information implicating someone we didn’t inspect it with a magnifying glass.”

And yet, Klein holds to account. He tells the story. But he does not blame. Even in the case of Bouchiki. “They were so, ‘oh, man, we have to do it,’” he says, describing the unacceptably trigger-happy atmosphere that led to the mistake. “No, we should check. You must raise questions. Although, I can understand, which is why I’m not judging. At the time…they thought they were going to go and assassinate the number one terrorist of the PLO…so we are not believing in a world that everything is pink and nice. No, no, there are terrorists at work.”

Spielberg’s Munich and George Jonas’s Vengeance tell the story of Avner, a Mossad secret agent. Jonas’s Avner “doesn’t exist” as far as the Mossad is concerned: he is removed from the payroll and is ordered never to return to Israel or to make contact with the Mossad (except via a Swiss safe-deposit box) until the mission is over. Before he is sent packing, Avner is handed a pre-determined list of 11 men whom he is told were involved in Munich, and whom he and his team are to kill. The team’s techniques, contacts, and whereabouts are entirely up to them and are not subject to supervision.

Jonas’s book has been widely discredited in Israel, and top Mossad agents – both on the record, in Haaretz, and off the record, to Klein – have confirmed that Avner did not, indeed, exist. Not in the top secret spy thriller sense, but in the fictional sense. He’s made up. “The whole thing with the movie,” Klein says, “we are sending you but we won’t recognize you, you are all alone in the field. It’s a joke. No organization is working in this way.”

Despite the Munich's factual inaccuracies and its larger-than-life cinematic drama, there’s something about Spielberg’s Avner that reminds me of Klein. As the story unfolds, Avner begins to question his mission. The endless bloodshed is getting to him, and what’s more, his list is starting to seem suspicious. Where is the evidence, he asks his supervisor, that these men were involved in Munich? How do we know, he asks his colleagues, that these men have blood on their hands?

Striking Back asks the same questions. Questions drive all of Klein’s work, both in Striking Back and in his work as a reporter for Time magazine. He criticizes Jonas and others because they “didn’t put question marks on anything. This isn’t my way of working. Put a question mark on everything.” Klein praises Spielberg for “raising all kinds of questions. It’s alright to raise these questions and to have a debate about that,” he says. “You don’t have to be afraid of that. Of debate.”

The act of asking questions, however, is where the similarities end. Avner’s questions serve to question Israeli counterterrorism policy, to reveal the shaky ethics behind the mission on which his country has sent him. Avner blames Israel for the bloodshed, for his own personal moral unraveling. He “refuses to return to Israel, as if decency were impossible there,” writes Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic. It is telling that Jonas’s book is called Vengeance, that throughout Munich, each time Avner finds his morale flagging he calls up images from the events at the Olympics and becomes outraged all over again. It’s as if Avner needs reminding that "They Started It"  in order to maintain some semblance of moral order. But moral order is not built on revenge. Prevention and deterrence, perhaps, but not revenge.

Klein’s questions, on the other hand, seek to make Israel stronger. Vengeance, Klein concedes, was an unfortunate part of the motivation after Munich. But unlike in Jonas’ and Spielberg’s accounts, in Klein’s view of the years following the events at Munich, revenge was “not major.” If there were “one hundred pieces of the puzzle, this is one, two, five, or twenty. But it’s not the whole picture,” he says. Unlike Avner, Aaron Klein does not blame Israel for the bloodshed. Yes, the assassinations perpetuated the cycle, he says. But let’s not forget where the bloodshed began. “What the Israelis are doing, they are preventing future terrorist attacks,” he says. “The guy who’s doing the terrorist attacks…he wants to just kill Israelis, he wants to spread fear among Israelis…But they are terrorists. We are not…We are defending our citizens.”

Klein hopes that his book will help the Mossad to ask more questions next time, to think more clearly, to act for the right reasons. “I want the people who take the decision, when they are saying prevention, I want them to be sure of it,” he says. “I want that they will be able to look in the mirror and say, ‘yeah, it was prevention.’”