Lyndon Johnson Administration:
Memorandum on Palestinian Terrorist Organizations

(December 2, 1966)

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This memorandum summarizes the major Palestinian terrorist organizations, how they are run, their links to other terror groups and Arab countries, and their anti-Israel beliefs.

1. The tradition of terrorism in Arab-Israeli relations extends back into the 1920's and '30's. Before the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49, terrorism was the principal weapon of both Arabs and Jews in harassing the British authorities in Palestine. In the early 1950's, the Arab governments organized paramilitary commando groups--fedayeen--which undertook raiding and sabotage missions into Israel. Israel's invasion of Sinai was in large measure a retaliation for this fedayeen activity, and the terrorist raiding ceased after the 1956 Sinai campaign.

The PLO

2. As official support of terrorist operations ceased, many Palestinian Arabs became increasingly frustrated at the relative lack of aggressiveness toward Israel on the part of Arab governments. There was persistent agitation among Palestinians throughout the Arab world for some kind of representative organization, and this culminated in 1964 in the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO received the formal sanction of the League of Arab States at an Arab summit meeting that year.

3. The organization is a kind of Palestinian government in exile but it has been careful to avoid such a designation because of King Husayn's well-founded suspicion that it posed a threat to his authority in west Jordan. The PLO's activities are mainly political and military; it has tried, for example, to form a "Palestine Liberation Army" around a core of Palestinian units which had been formed over the years in the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi armies. Nasir exercises considerable influence over the PLO, though he does not completely control its leaders. The organization's "Voice of Palestine" broadcasts emanate from Cairo. The PLO is led by a dynamic super-orator, Ahmad Shuqayri, a Palestinian who at various times has been a UN representative for Syria and Saudi Arabia.

4. The PLO's long-range plans for opposing the Israelis initially omitted sponsorship of terrorist operations into Israel. PLO leaders and sponsors recognized that such operations would provoke Israeli retaliation, and very possibly lead to a war for which the Arab governments are still not ready. This policy was a source of frustration to many activist Palestinians, and it led to the emergence of the present generation of terrorist groups. The PLO has failed to persuade these groups to submit to over-all PLO direction, and, to meet their competition, has within the past few months felt compelled to undertake such activities on its own. The "Organization of Heroes of the Return" (to Palestine) is the group which appears to be the new PLO terrorist arm. Some of its members clashed with Israeli forces near the Lebanese border in mid-October.

Fatah

5. The most prominent of the terrorist groups is Fatah (a reverse acronym of the Arabic for "Palestine Liberation Movement"). Fatah is sometimes also known by the name of its commando arm, Asifa (Storm). Fatah appears to be descended from a clandestine Palestinian organization--now inactive--which was formed in the mid-1950's. Some of its members had connections with the Muslim Brotherhood, a conservative, strongly anti-Nasir politico-religious movement. Fatah also may have had links with the Arab Higher Committee of Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the ex-Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, with whom the Brotherhood collaborated in regard to Palestine affairs.

6. In its present incarnation, Fatah emerged publicly in January 1965, when it claimed responsibility for terrorist incidents in Israel. Its leaders had previously participated in the organization of the PLO, but had become disenchanted. They are also disgusted with the continuing inability of most Arab governments to act decisively toward Israel, and are wary of any official control which might curtail Fatah's operations.

7. Syria, the most bellicose of the Arab states, is the one government whose policy comes closest to Fatah's violently anti-Israeli line. Damascus supports Fatah by providing it with a base for its operations, training facilities, and a propaganda outlet. The infiltrations into Israel, however, have been undertaken from Jordanian and Lebanese territory, since those borders are more easily traversed. This has occurred without the approval of either the Jordanian or the Lebanese government. Most of Fatah's financial support comes from wealthy Palestinians living in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

8. The number of people who participate in Fatah, as well as in other terrorist organizations, is unknown and probably fluctuates. Many of the terrorists are professional thugs or smugglers, and some were active against Israel in 1955-56. The Israelis say Fatah has been responsible for 61 sabotage incidents. Israeli Foreign Minister Eban recently stated, however, that Fatah had been inactive for about six weeks.

The PLF

9. A rival Palestinian terrorist organization called the "Palestinian Liberation Front" (PLF) has been credited by the Israelis with the 12 November road mining incident which triggered the Israeli raid into Jordan the next day. Jordanian officials also suspected the PLF of having perpetrated that incident, and they had begun a search for those responsible at the time Israel attacked. Little is known about the PLF. Like Fatah, it apparently aims at provoking a general Arab-Israeli war, but it is reputed to be more skilled in its operations. PLF members are said to regard Fatah as an organization of publicity seekers.

10. Some "terrorism" in Israel is more or less spontaneous. For years, Arab smugglers and crossborder operators have occasionally clashed with Israeli security forces. Incidents of this sort have been much reduced as the Israelis' security measures have been tightened. The organized, professional terrorism of the Fatah, the PLF, and of the PLO's new arm, poses problems for Israeli authorities that have no easy solution.

Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, Jordan, Vol. III. Secret; No Foreign Dissem. A note on the memorandum states that it was produced solely by CIA and was prepared by the Office of Current Intelligence.

Sources: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, V. 18, Arab-Israeli Dispute 1964-1967. DC: GPO, 2000.

Munich Olympic Massacre:
Background & Overview

(September 5, 1972)

Munich Massacre: Table of Contents | President Nixon Reaction | Israeli Response

It was 4:30 in the morning on Sept. 5, 1972, when five Palestinian terrorists wearing track sweat suits climbed the six-foot six-inch fence surrounding the Olympic Village. Although they were seen by several people, no one thought anything was unusual since athletes routinely hopped the fence; moreover, the terrorists' weapons were hidden in athletic bags.

These five were met by three more men who are presumed to have obtained credentials to enter the village. The Palestinians then used stolen keys to enter two apartments being used by the Israeli team at 31 Connollystraße.

Israeli wrestling referee Yossef Gutfreund heard a faint scratching noise at the door of the first apartment. When he investigated, he saw the door begin to open and masked men with guns on the other side. He shouted “Hevre tistalku!” (Hebrew: "Guys, get out of here!") and threw his nearly 300-lb. (135-kg) weight against the door to try to stop the Palestinians from forcing their way in. In the confusion, coach Tuvia Sokolovsky and race-walker Dr. Shaul Ladany escaped and another four athletes, plus the two team doctors and delegation head Shmuel Lalkin, managed to hide.

Wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg, attacked the kidnappers as the hostages were being moved from one apartment to another, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape. The burly Weinberg knocked one of the intruders unconscious and stabbed another with a fruit knife before being shot to death. Weightlifter and father of three Yossef Romano, 31, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being killed. The Arabs then succeeded in rounding up nine Israelis to hold as hostages.

At 9:30, the terrorists announced that they were Palestinians and demanded that Israel release 200 Arab prisoners and that the terrorists be given safe passage out of Germany. The Palestinians were led by Luttif Afif (“Issa”), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal (“Tony”), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid (“Paolo”), Khalid Jawad (“Salah”), Ahmed Chic Thaa (“Abu Halla”), Mohammed Safady (“Badran”), Adnan Al-Gashey (“Denawi”), and his cousin Jamal Al-Gashey (“Samir”).

(Top, L-R): Moshe Weinberg; Yossef Romano; Yossef Gutfreund; David Berger
(Second Row): Yacov Springer; Ze'ev Friedman; Amitzur Shapira; Eliezer Halfin
(Third Row): Mark Slavin; Andre Spitzer; Kehat Shorr

After hours of tense negotiations, the Palestinians, who it was later learned belonged to a PLO faction called Black September, agreed to a plan whereby they were to be taken by helicopter to the NATO air base at Firstenfeldbruck where they would be given an airplane to fly them and their hostages to Cairo. The Israelis were then taken by bus to the helicopters and flown to the airfield. In the course of the transfer, the Germans discovered that there were eight terrorists instead of the five they expected and realized that they had not assigned enough marksmen to carry out the plan to kill the terrorists at the airport.

After the helicopters landed at the air base around 10:30 p.m., the German sharpshooters attempted to kill the terrorists and a bloody firefight ensued. At 11, the media was mistakenly informed that the hostages had been saved and the news was announced to a relieved Israeli public. Almost an hour later, however, new fighting broke out and one of the helicopters holding the Israelis was blown up by a terrorist grenade. The remaining nine hostages in the second helicopter were shot to death by one of the surviving terrorists.

At 3 a.m., a drawn and teary-eyed Jim McKay, who had been reporting the drama throughout the day as part of ABC's Olympic coverage, announced: “They're all gone.”

In July 2012, German magazine Der Spiegel reported that Germany had in fact been warned about the possibility of a Palestinian terrorist attack at the Games but took no actions to secure the Olympic Village.

Five of the terrorists were killed along with one policeman, and three were captured. A little over a month later, on Oct. 29, a Lufthansa jet was hijacked by terrorists demanding that the Munich killers be released.

The destroyed helicopters on the runway in Munich

The Germans capitulated and the terrorists were let go, but an Israeli assassination squad was assigned to track them down along with those responsible for planning the massacre. According to George Jonas in Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, eight of the 11 men targeted for death were killed. Of the remaining three, one died of natural causes and the other two were assassinated, but it is not known for sure if they were killed by Israeli agents.

The elevent terrorists on the list were:

- Kamal Adwan: Chief of sabotage operations forAl Fatah in the disputed territories
- Hussein Abad Al-Chir: PLO contact with KGB in Cyprus
- Mohammed Boudia: Linked with European PLO
- Abu Daoud: Admitted member of the Black September Organization
- Dr. Wadi Haddad: Chief terrorist linked with Dr. George Habash
- Mohmoud Mahshari: PLO member and coordinator of Munich incident
- Kamal Nassir: Official PLO spokesman and member of the PLO Executive Committee
- Ali Hassan Salameh: Developed and executed the Munich operation
- Abu Yussuf: High ranking PLO official
- Wael Zwaiter: Cousin to Yasser Arafat, organizer of PLO terrorism in Europe
- Dr. Basil Paoud Al-Kubaisi: Responsible for logistics within the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

The Jonas book was the basis for two movies about Munich, “The Sword of Gideon” and Steven Spielberg's 2006 Oscar nominee, “Munich.” In the subsequent publicity about Spielberg's film, reports have discredited the account in Jonas, which was largely based on what the author was told by a former self-described Mossadagent, Juval Aviv, who claimed he was the leader of the assassination team. In fact, journalists Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov found that “Aviv never served in Mossad, or any Israeli intelligence organization. He had failed basic training as an Israeli Defence Force commando, and his nearest approximation to spy work was as a lowly gate guard for the airline El Al in New York in the early 70s.”

In contrast to the account of “Operation Wrath of God” offered by Jonas, Mossad agents have told reporters subsequently that no one team was sent to kill a specific list of terrorists.

Meanwhile, the mastermind of the massacre remained at large. Abu Daoud was shot thirteen times on July 27, 1981 in a Warsaw hotel coffee shop, but survived the attack. Daoud was allowed safe passage through Israel in 1996 so he could go to a PLO meeting convened in the Gaza Strip to rescind an article in its charter that called for Israel's eradication. In 1999, Abu Daoud admitted his role in the massacre in his autobiography, Memoirs of a Palestinian Terrorist.

Daoud, who lived with his wife on a pension provided by the Palestinian Authority, claimed his commandos never intended to harm the athletes and blamed their deaths on the German police and the stubbornness of then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. On December 27, 2005, Daoud reiterated that he had no regrets about his involvement in the Munich attack, and that Steven Spielberg's new film about the incident would not deliver reconciliation. Daoud died of kidney failure at age 73 on July 3, 2010, in Damascus.

Bassam Abu Sharif, a member of the PFLP at the time, said the motive for the operation in Munich was to attract publicity for the Palestinian cause and to win the release of Palestinian prisoners.

The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes was not considered sufficiently serious to merit canceling or postponing the Olympics. “Incredibly, they're going on with it,” Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time. “It's almost like having a dance at Dachau.”

On December 1, 2015, new information about the Munich massacre was released to the public for the first time via an article in the New York Times. The article shed light on long-hidden details from that day, and included interviews with Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer, who were both widowed in the attack. Among the most horrific new details revealed was that Yossef Romano, Ilana Romano's husband, was beaten and brutally castrated by the terrorists while the Israelis were being held hostage. Most of these specific and gory details about the tragedy were not revealed to the victims families until September 1992, when the German government released hundreds of pages of reports on the attack and photographs of the crime scenes that they had previously claimed did not exist.

Sources: Jerusalem Report;
Jonas, George. Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team. NY: Bantam Books, 1985;
Thomas B. Hunter, “The Israeli Response to the Munich Olympic Massacre,” Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International, Vol. 7, No. 4, (Summer 2001);
Wikipedia;
Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov, “Munich: fact and fantasy,” The Guardian, (January 17, 2006);
“Planner of Munich olympic attacks dies,” Jerusalem Post (July 3, 2010)
Borden, Sam. “Long-Hidden Details Reveal Cruelty of 1972 Munich Attackers,” New York Times (December 1, 2015)

Jerusalem Institute

Monday, July 25, 2016