The Long Reach

On the morning of September 5, 1972, eight Palestinian gunmen of Black September slipped into the Olympic Village in Munich and took nine Israeli athletes hostage; two others had already been killed resisting. A botched German rescue at Fürstenfeldbruck air base ended with all nine hostages dead. Eleven Israelis murdered on live television — and a stunned Israeli leadership asking what deterrence could possibly mean now.

Prime Minister Golda Meir convened a secret inner cabinet group — Meir, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and Mossad chief Zvi Zamir — remembered in Israeli histories as "Committee X." Their authorization was sweeping: find the men behind the massacre, wherever they were, and kill them. A target list was drawn up from turned PLO personnel and friendly European intelligence services, and the mission later became known as Operation Wrath of God.

What followed over the next years was a shadow war across Europe. Mossad's hit teams, operating under the codename Bayonet, killed suspected Black September operatives in Rome, Paris, Cyprus, and elsewhere. The campaign's most audacious operation came in April 1973. Three targets in Beirut were beyond the reach of ordinary assassinations: Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar, head of Fatah's intelligence arm, which ran Black September; Kamal Adwan, who controlled PLO operations inside Israel; and Kamal Nassir, the PLO's spokesman.

Operation Spring of Youth was a joint Mossad–IDF assault. On the night of April 9–10, 1973, Israeli Navy missile boats landed commandos in Zodiac speedboats on a deserted Lebanese beach. Mossad agents waited with rented cars. The commandos drove into downtown Beirut disguised as civilians — and some, including the raid's leader, a young Ehud Barak, dressed as a woman, wig and all. In guarded apartment buildings they killed Najjar, Adwan, and Nassir; other detachments blew up PFLP headquarters and a Fatah explosives plant. The teams withdrew to the beach and vanished.

The campaign was not clean. In July 1973 in Lillehammer, Norway, Mossad agents killed Ahmed Bouchikhi, a Moroccan waiter they mistook for a Black September leader; five operatives were arrested, Israel's European network was exposed, and Meir suspended the operation under furious international pressure. The pursuit continued intermittently — notably the 1979 Beirut car bombing that killed Ali Hassan Salameh, the operation's chief strategist, along with bystanders.

Wrath of God demonstrated a new doctrine: Israel would hunt its enemies beyond its borders rather than absorb their blows. It disrupted Black September's European operations, but at real cost — diplomatic isolation, the Lillehammer fiasco, and a precedent for covert killing that still shapes debate. One caution for readers: much popular lore about the campaign comes from George Jonas's 1984 book Vengeance, which is thinly sourced and disputed by former Mossad officials, and Steven Spielberg's Munich (2005) is fiction. Serious histories — Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First and Ian Black and Benny Morris's Israel's Secret Wars — document the scope differently, and on several operations the accounts diverge.