Abu Daoud visited the Olympic Village with a young woman on the day of the opening ceremonies. Posing as Brazilians, the Palestinians talked their way past security and entered the village. As Abu Daoud tells the story, a female member of the Israeli delegation unwittingly invited them into the foyer of the Israeli athletes' apartment complex at 31 Connollystrasse. “She had no way of knowing she had considerably facilitated our task,” Abu Daoud wrote almost three decades later.26 The operational commander of Operation Iqrit and Biri'm now had detailed knowledge of the layout of the apartments he would order his men to storm.
Eleven days later, Black September transformed the Games of Peace and Joy into a spectacle of terror and death. Just after 4 A.M. on 5 September, the eve of the second anniversary of Skyjack Sunday, eight Palestinians converged outside the Olympic Village near the Israelis' apartments on 31 Connollystrasse. Their running suits and athletic bags completed the disguise of athletes returning from local pubs after curfew. Other athletes saw them but suspected nothing. No security guards patrolled the parameter. Only a low wall stood between the Palestinian terrorists and the Jewish athletes asleep in separate apartments. Thirty minutes later, after a swift assault on two apartments, two Israelis were dead and nine others taken hostage. It was their last day of life.
The Palestinians encountered resistance trying to enter one apartment, but forced their way in past an Israeli who threw himself against the door. They shot and wounded another Israeli, Moshe Weinberg, who struggled for a terrorist's weapon. The bullet tore through his jaw, causing a horrible wound, but did not knock him unconscious. One Israeli escaped through a window when he was awakened by the sounds of struggle outside his bedroom. Within minutes the Palestinians held six Israelis and moved on to a second apartment, forcing Weinberg, who was bleeding profusely, to come with them. The Palestinians seized the six Israelis sleeping in the second apartment without resistance. But as they forced the athletes at gunpoint back to the first apartment, one Israeli broke free and ran down a flight of stairs, into a parking garage beneath the apartments and to safety. In the same instant, Moshe Weinberg lunged at the Palestinians again. The act probably saved his compatriot's life, but it cost him his own, as a terrorist shot him to death in the act. When the Palestinians gathered the second group of hostages together with the first in an upper bedroom, another Israeli, Yossef Romano, made a desperate grab for one of the terrorist's weapons. The Palestinian killed him instantly with a burst from his Kalashnikov. The assault ended with Romano's death. There, in a bedroom before dawn, nine Israelis were bound and forced to sit in a circle around Romano's corpse on the floor in a pool of blood as a warning to the Israelis about the punishment for resistance.
By 5 A.M. the Israelis who escaped alerted officials in the Olympic Village to the assault. Word spread throughout West German officialdom and the media. As police arrived at the scene, Issa, the commander of the operation, appeared outside the apartment to communicate demands for the release of hundreds of fedayeen from Israeli prisons and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff, the leaders of the Red Army Faction, whom West German authorities had finally arrested in June. Issa set a 9 A.M. deadline for compliance with the demands; after that Palestinians would begin executing the Israelis one by one. To prove their seriousness, the Palestinians threw Weinberg's body into the street in front of the apartment where they held the other Olympians.
The West German government conveyed Black September's demands to Golda Meir, the indomitable Israeli prime minister, who immediately rejected them in principle. Meir refused even to contemplate negotiations. Instead, Meir immediately dispatched the head of the Mossad, Zvi Zamir, to Munich as she pleaded with the West German authorities to permit an elite Sayaret Matkal counterterrorist unit to assist in a rescue. The Israeli special forces had proven their abilities just last May, when they took down the Sabena hijackers. Meir put them on alert to leave for West Germany at a moment's notice. The call to action never came.
West Germany's highest officials rushed to Munich before day's end. Chancellor Willy Brandt arrived in the afternoon. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the interior minister and future foreign minister, arrived at the same time and met face-to-face with Issa. Genscher even offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the release of the Israelis. Then the West Germans offered an undisclosed sum of money and safe passage for the Palestinians in exchange for the lives of the Jewish athletes and the swift termination of an embarrassing incident. A cash offer worked in February when the PFLP seized a Lufthansa flight and diverted it to Aden. It was the PFLP that seized the Lufthansa flight, but Black September was not content with a massive infusion of cash into its war chest. Israel's adamant refusal to capitulate to the terrorists' demands—or to make a good will gesture like those offered during the El Al crisis in Algeria in 1968—left the West Germans with few options. The most promising possibility was to persuade the Egyptian government to mediate. In fact, the terrorists' contingency plan involved departure to an Arab state with the hostages. But Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would not assume responsibility for their lives. With Israel refusing to negotiate and Egypt refusing to mediate, the West Germans could only attempt to delay and deceive the eight terrorists barricaded inside 31 Connollystrasse with the nine Olympians.
The West Germans managed to push back the 9 A.M. deadline for the beginning of the executions until noon, then one o'clock, then three, then five, then seven. By early afternoon they were reluctantly planning a rescue operation. The first attempt at an armed rescue came after the deadline was pushed back to seven. By then officials, including Genscher, had entered the Israeli apartment and seen the terror in the eyes of the Jewish athletes for themselves. “I will never forget those faces,” Genscher would say later.27 Rescue must have seemed the last best option. But there was no elite counterterrorism unit up to the task. The best the Munich police could muster were a dozen or so police for an assault, police whose courage surpassed their training. Fortunately for them, their superiors never gave the order to attack. Issa, who saw live television images of the police assembling on the roof above them, forced the West Germans to pull back with the threat of the immediate execution of hostages. The journalistic impulse to broadcast breaking news compromised the mission and, although the indiscretion could have cost lives, it probably saved them for the time being. Even some of the police selected to break into the apartments through the air vents admitted the operation was suicide. But the disaster that was adverted in the Olympic Village was awaiting the Israeli athletes, and the terrorists who abducted them, on the outskirts of Munich.
The West Germans seized on another stratagem: they would lure the Palestinians to Fürstenfeldbruck, an airport outside Munich, with the false promise that a Lufthansa 737 would fly them and the hostages to Cairo. Genscher informed Issa that a peaceful resolution of the crisis was near. Issa had only to allow the West Germans time to arrange the complicated logistics: helicopters to transport the Palestinians and the Israeli Olympians to Fürstenfeldbruck, a jet to fly them to Egypt, pilots who would risk becoming hostages or casualties. It would take another three hours for the West Germans to put everything in place. The reality was that the West Germans wanted to lure the Palestinians into a field of fire. Snipers took positions in the parking garage beneath the apartment complex. It was nearly two hundred yards from the Israeli apartment to the field where the helicopters were waiting. But Issa, who took the precaution of walking the distance with officials to observe the route for himself, demanded a bus. The West Germans were forced to move the ambush to Fürstenfeldbruck. It was after 10:00 P.M. before Issa, the seven other fedayeen, and the nine Israelis made their way from 31 Connollystrasse to the bus and through the parking garage to the helicopters for the thirty-minute flight to Fürstenfeldbruck. Twenty minutes later, the two helicopters were airborne. The Israelis were bound inside, five in one helicopter, four in the other.
The fatal tactical errors at Fürstenfeldbruck were those of a police force that had not contemplated a terror attack in the Bavarian capital. The snipers deployed at the darkened airport were poorly armed and inadequately trained for a firefight with hardened commandos. They had only hours to organize an ambush. Those on the ground were not even in direct radio contact with each other. The police