Read Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response for Free Online

look from Yardena didn’t change his mind. Principles were immovable, always. Romano, Israel’s champion weight lifter in the middleweight class for the last ten years, kept the pressure on for a few more seconds and then returned with Halfin to his seat. At 0030 hours the athletes filed off the bus at the Olympic Village. Yardena and Arik continued on to their apartment, ten minutes away. The pleasant Munich weather brought a few of the Israeli athletes to the dining room for a late night snack. Eventually everybody said good night and went to their quarters.
    The delegation had been assigned five apartments. Apartment 1 was for the coaches and judges; Apartment 2, the marksmen, the fencers, and the track and field athletes; Apartment 3, the weight lifters and wrestlers; Apartment 4, the doctor; Apartment 5, Shmuel Lalkin. The women stayed in separate dorms far from the men’s quarters. Israel’s two sailors were housed in northern Germany, in Kiel, where their competition was being held.
    It was almost one in the morning when Lalkin finally went to his room. He set his alarm for 6 A.M. He wanted to support Mark Slavin, the rookie wrestler, by attending his pre-match weigh-in.
             
    While the members of the Israeli delegation were enjoying
Fiddler on the Roof,
eight Palestinian terrorists, traveling solo and in pairs, arrived at the Munich central railway station, just a ten-minute walk from the theater, and ordered dinner. They were excited. Nobody could sit still. Whispers were exchanged. This was their first face-to-face meeting. Seated around a rectangular table, they learned the particulars of the mission. One of the commanders leaned in from the head of the table and, speaking in a hushed tone, explained that they were going to kidnap the Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village, take them hostage, and release them in exchange for over two hundred Palestinian prisoners held behind bars in Israel. The hostages and the kidnappers would fly to an Arab state, where the exchange would be made. The operation, called Ikrit and Biram, was named in memory of two Christian villages near the Israeli border with Lebanon. The villagers were forcibly evacuated by the Israelis in 1951 “until the security situation allows their return.” Abu-Iyad chose the code name as a symbol of the Palestinian desire to return to a homeland that had been torn away from under their feet.
    Jamal Al-Jishey, a dark-skinned nineteen-year-old, was brimming with motivation. Years later, as one of the three Palestinians to live through Munich, he would say (as captured in the documentary film
One Day in September
), “I felt great pride and happiness that I would be participating in an operation against the Israelis. I was finally going to fulfill my dream.” Just a few months before, as the heat of the summer started to rise, Al-Jishey was summoned to an elite training camp established by Fatah leaders on the Mediterranean shore, a few miles south of Beirut. The Al-Jisheys lived in Shatila, the teeming Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. Fifty men, the youngest of them only seventeen, arrived with Al-Jishey for basic training. All the recruits learned how to fire an AK -47 assault rifle and properly release F -1 hand grenades. At the end of the training session, six out of the fifty were selected. They lived in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and were ready to give their lives if necessary.
             
    The group’s members were: Adnan Al-Jishey, twenty-six, uncle of Jamal Al-Jishey, married, and a gifted student who held a chemistry scholarship to the American University of Beirut; Mohammed Safady, nineteen, garrulous and confident; Khalid Jawad, a strong soccer player who had lived in West Germany for two years; Ahmed Sheik Thaa, who grew up in Germany; and Afif Ahmed Hamid, a veteran member of the Fatah organization who had recently returned to Beirut after studying for a little more than a year at a German