There was no better time and place than Zvi Zamir's funeral on Tuesday for Mossad chief David Barnea to announce to the world that each and every one of the October 7 masterminds will be eliminated.
Sooner or later. Through car bombs, exploding phones, poison or shooting. Exactly the same thing that Zvi Zamir – head of Mossad between 1968 and 1974 – did with those responsible for the death of eleven Israeli athletes participating in the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.
"We are in war. And Mossad, today as 50 years ago, is committed to settling accounts with all those who materialized, planned and commanded October 7,” said David Barnea. And just in case there was no clarity, he added: “It will take time, like in Munich, but we will catch them wherever they are. Every Arab mother must know that if a child of hers has participated, directly or indirectly, in the carnage of October 7, her blood will be shed.”
Selective assassinations are part of the written powers of Mossad, the foreign intelligence service. Not only that: they are a trademark specialty of the house, following the pattern of Munich's revenge.
1972 Olympic Games. Israel attends the event in Germany with a spirit of reconciliation, 27 years after the Holocaust. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong. A Palestinian Black September commando infiltrates the Israeli section of the Olympic village at four in the morning on September 5 and takes hostages. They aspire to exchange them for 236 prisoners in Israel and Germany (including terrorists Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Bader).
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir flatly refuses to negotiate, but requests authorization to send an elite group skilled in kidnappings. The refusal now was German.
The next day, the delegation of Palestinians and Israelis moves to the airport, where German shooters receive the order to shoot the kidnappers (eight and not five, as the police believed). The shooting lasts 75 minutes. A fiasco, because the Palestinians kill the kidnapped people. The Israeli delegation returns home without medals and eleven coffins.
Another trauma and in Germany. Israel under shock. Prime Minister Golda Meir accepted the proposal of Zvi Zamir and counterintelligence chief Aharon Yariv: eliminate all those responsible for the Munich massacre. Wherever they were. Operation Wrath of God is born, faithful to the spirit of an eye for an eye.
The first execution by special commandos took place in October 1972 in Rome, a favorite city for the Palestinian leaders spread throughout Europe. A cousin of Yasir Arafat, the leader of the PLO, was gunned down in the lobby of the building where he lived.
From Rome to Paris, December 1972. An Israeli agent poses as a journalist and arranges a telephone interview with the PLO delegate, in whose device they had managed to place a bomb with a remote detonator. And there was boom.
In January 1973, it was the turn of the PLO delegate in Cyprus, who had explosives placed under the bed of the Olympic Hotel, where he was staying.
Beirut was another obligatory stop. The mecca of the Palestinian resistance. A commando arrived by sea, whose members included Ehud Barak, future prime minister, half of them disguised as women, joined Mossad agents in the Lebanese capital to kill three Palestinian leaders on the same day in April 1973. (Barak returned home within hours and could not answer his wife's questions about the traces of carmine).
Until the Oslo agreements of 1993, the operation was in force because there were names left on the list. Mossad gained international prestige, but also suffered a serious setback. He believed he had located the coveted Ali Salameh, the red prince, in Lilenhamer, Norway, and a commando shot the waiter Ahmed Bouchiki on the night of July 21, 1973 as he was leaving the cinema, along with his pregnant wife. “Too self-confident,” summarized a Mossad agent. The victim's last hours ruled out terrorist habits. As for the Palestinian Red Prince, he was blown up in Beirut in 1979 by means of a bomb placed in front of his vehicle. On the fifth try it was the charm.
