Operation Wrath of God

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Background

On 5 September 1972 — during the Munich Summer Olympics — eight members of the Palestinian armed group Black September took eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage at the Olympic Village. Two Israeli team members were killed in the initial attack; the remaining nine, alongside one West German police officer, were killed during a failed German rescue attempt at Fürstenfeldbruck airfield that night. Five of the eight Black September members were killed; three were captured and subsequently released by the West German Government on 29 October 1972 after Black September hijacked a Lufthansa flight.¹

Black September was the Palestinian armed group that had emerged in the wake of the September 1970 expulsion of the Palestine Liberation Organisation from Jordan. The group was substantially affiliated with Fatah — the dominant faction within the PLO under Yasser Arafat — although the institutional relationships between Black September, Fatah, and other Palestinian armed factions were the subject of substantial subsequent investigation and contested account.²

Prime Minister Golda Meir established a small ad-hoc decision-making body — Committee X — to determine the Israeli response. The Committee, comprising Meir, Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, IDF Chief of Staff David Elazar, and Mossad Director Zvi Zamir, authorised on 16 September 1972 the comprehensive Israeli operation that became known as Mivtzaʿ Zaʿam haEl — Operation Wrath of God.³

The Operation

The operation was directed principally by Mossad Director Zvi Zamir and run on the operational side by Mike Harari, the head of Caesarea — the Mossad's special-operations unit. The operational structure included multiple distinct elements: intelligence collection on Black September members and supporters across Western Europe and the Middle East; the planning and execution of targeted killings; and the parallel maintenance of operational deniability. The targeting list reportedly included between approximately 11 and 20 named Black September and PLO figures, depending on the source; multiple Palestinian figures killed in the post-1972 period have been variously characterised in subsequent accounts.⁴

The publicly identified Wrath of God killings across the 1972–1979 period included:

• Wael Zwaiter (16 October 1972, Rome): A Palestinian writer and translator, killed in the lobby of his Rome apartment building. Subsequently the subject of substantial dispute over Israeli operational identification: Italian and Palestinian sources have disputed Zwaiter's identification as a Black September operative.⁵
• Mahmoud Hamshari (wounded 8 December 1972, Paris; died 9 January 1973): The PLO representative in Paris, wounded by a remotely detonated bomb concealed in his telephone; he died of his injuries at Cochin Hospital on 9 January 1973.
• Hussein Al Bashir (24 January 1973, Nicosia): A Palestinian official, killed by a remotely detonated bomb in his hotel room.
• Basil al-Kubaisi (6 April 1973, Paris): A Palestinian academic.
• Operation Spring of Youth (9–10 April 1973, Beirut): An IDF Sayeret Matkal special-forces operation, supported by Mossad intelligence, against three senior PLO figures in Beirut — Muhammad Youssef al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan, and Kamal Nasser. The operation, led by Lieutenant Colonel Ehud Barak (later Prime Minister) and Major Yoni Netanyahu, was the most consequential single Wrath of God-period operation. Barak and Netanyahu were among the operatives.⁶
• Mohammed Boudia (28 June 1973, Paris): A Palestinian leader of European operations.
• Successive subsequent operations across the 1973–1979 period.

The Lillehammer Affair

On 21 July 1973, in the Norwegian town of Lillehammer, a Mossad team from Caesarea killed Ahmed Bouchikhi — a Moroccan waiter, married to a Norwegian woman, with no connection to Black September or the PLO — having mistakenly identified him as Ali Hassan Salameh, the Black September operations chief. The killing was conducted in front of Bouchikhi's pregnant Norwegian wife. Six members of the Mossad team were arrested by Norwegian police; all six were tried by Norwegian courts on charges including murder and complicity in murder, and five were convicted (one was acquitted).⁷

The Lillehammer affair has been characterised in essentially all subsequent academic and journalistic literature as the most consequential operational failure in Mossad history. The institutional consequences included the temporary suspension of Wrath of God operations, sustained Israeli internal review of the operational identification process that had produced the misidentification, and substantial diplomatic damage in the relationships between Israel and Norway, France (the Bouchikhi family was at the time French residents), and broader Europe.⁸

The pause in operations was, however, temporary. Ali Hassan Salameh — the actual Wrath of God target whose mistaken identity had produced the Lillehammer killing — was eventually killed by a Mossad car bomb in Beirut on 22 January 1979, more than five years after the Lillehammer affair. The operation that killed Salameh also killed his four bodyguards and four bystanders, including European nationals; at least 16 others were injured.⁹

The Israeli Government continued to deny operational responsibility for Lillehammer for decades. In 1996, Israel paid compensation to the Bouchikhi family; the payment was characterised by Israeli officials as not constituting an admission of state responsibility. Multiple of the Mossad team members convicted in Norway and subsequently released — including Sylvia Rafael — went on to public lives.¹⁰

Legacy

Operation Wrath of God has functioned, since the post-1972 period, as a load-bearing reference for the question of state-intelligence-service practice in the conduct of targeted killings of foreign nationals — and for the institutional question of how such operations are authorised, conducted, and reviewed.

The case has been the subject of substantial subsequent academic, journalistic, and cinematic treatment — including George Jonas's Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (1984; the basis for the 2005 Steven Spielberg film Munich); Aaron J. Klein's Striking Back (2005, drawing extensively on Israeli sources); and Ronen Bergman's Rise and Kill First (2018, the most extensive published account of Israeli targeted-killing practice across the post-1948 period).¹¹

For the Mossad institutionally, the operation established the post-1972 model of foreign targeted-killing operations that has continued — through the 1988 killing of Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) in Tunis, the 1992 killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Abbas al-Musawi, the 1995 killing of Islamic Jihad Secretary-General Fathi Shaqaqi in Malta, the 2008 killing of Hezbollah operations chief Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus, the 2010 killing of Hamas operative Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai, the 2012 killing of Hamas military chief Ahmed Jabari in Gaza, and successive later operations.¹²

For the broader question of state-targeted-killing practice, the Wrath of God case has been the subject of substantial ethical and international-law analysis. The 2006 Israeli Supreme Court judgment in Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel — which set out the legal framework under which targeted killings of suspected terrorists could lawfully be conducted by the State of Israel — built substantially on the post-Wrath of God Israeli institutional doctrine.¹³

Related agencies

This dossier relates principally to the Mossad. The Operation Spring of Youth element involved the IDF and the Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman). The country-level context is on the page for Israel.

Sources & Further Reading

1. Simon Reeve, One Day in September: The Full Story of the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and the Israeli Revenge Operation "Wrath of God" (Arcade, 2000); Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel's Deadly Response (Random House, 2005); International Olympic Committee, "Sad Anniversary of the tragedy during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games".
2. UN Resolution and documentation on the 1972 Munich attack; Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford UP, 1997); Klein, Striking Back, op. cit.
3. Klein, Striking Back; Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations (Random House, 2018).
4. Bergman, Rise and Kill First, chapters on Wrath of God; Klein, Striking Back.
5. Klein, Striking Back; Bergman, Rise and Kill First.
6. Klein, Striking Back; Reeve, One Day in September; Israeli IDF Spokesperson historical accounts of Operation Spring of Youth.
7. State v. Tamir et al., Lillehammer District Court, 1974; Bergman, Rise and Kill First, chapter on Lillehammer.
8. Norwegian Government and judicial sources; Israeli press coverage of subsequent institutional review, 1973–1974.
9. Klein, Striking Back; Bergman, Rise and Kill First.
10. Bergman, Rise and Kill First, chapter on Lillehammer aftermath; "Israel pays Lillehammer family," AP and successive Norwegian press, 1996.
11. George Jonas, Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team (Simon & Schuster, 1984); Steven Spielberg (director), Munich (2005); Bergman, Rise and Kill First.
12. Bergman, Rise and Kill First, comprehensive across post-Wrath of God targeted-killing practice.
13. Israeli Supreme Court, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel v. Government of Israel, HCJ 769/02, 13 December 2006 (English translation).