For a citizen of a country manacled to its past, Dr. Georg

Sieber had a remarkable knack for seeing the future. In the

months leading up to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West

German organizers asked Sieber, then a 39-year-old police

psychologist, to "tabletop" the event, as security experts call

the exercise of sketching out worst-case scenarios. Sieber looks

a bit like the writer Tom Clancy, and the crises he limned drew

from every element of the airport novelist's genre: kidnappers

and hostages, superpower patrons and smuggled arms, hijacked

jets and remote-controlled bombs. Studying the most ruthless

groups of that era, from the Irish Republican Army and the

Palestine Liberation Organization to the Basque separatist group

ETA and West Germany's own Baader-Meinhof Gang, he came up with

26 cases, each imagined in apocalyptic detail. Most of Sieber's

scenarios focused on the Olympic Village, the Games' symbolic

global community; one that did not--a jet hired by a Swedish

right wing group crashes into an Olympic Stadium filled with

people--foreshadowed a September day in another city many years

later.

But on Sept. 5, 1972, at the Munich Olympics, history would not

wait. It hastened to crib from one of Sieber's scenarios

virtually horror for horror. The psychologist had submitted to

organizers Situation 21, which comprised the following

particulars: At 5:00 one morning, a dozen armed Palestinians

would scale the perimeter fence of the Village. They would

invade the building that housed the Israeli delegation, kill a

hostage or two ("To enforce discipline," Sieber says today),

then demand the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails and a

plane to fly to some Arab capital. Even if the Palestinians

failed to liberate their comrades, Sieber predicted, they would

"turn the Games into a political demonstration" and would be

"prepared to die.... On no account can they be expected to

surrender."

To Sieber, every terrorist organization has an M.O. that makes it

a kind of text to be read. With the Black September faction of

the PLO he hardly had to read between the lines. "I was simply

trying to answer the question, If they were to do it, how would

they do it?" Sieber says, in his house in the Nymphenburg

district of Munich, the Bavarian capital.

There was only one problem with Sieber's "situations." To guard

against them, organizers would have to scrap plans to stage the

Games they had been planning for years--a sporting jubilee to

repudiate the last Olympics on German soil, the 1936 Nazi Games

in Berlin. The Munich Olympics were to be "the Carefree Games."

There would be no place for barbed wire, troops or police

bristling with sidearms. Why, at an Olympic test event at

Munich's Dante Stadium in 1971, when police deployed nothing

more menacing than German shepherds, foreign journalists had

teed off on the organizers, accusing them of forgetting that

Dachau lay only 12 miles away. Nein, the organizers came to

agree, where Berlin had been festooned with swastikas and

totalitarian red, Munich would feature a one-worldish logo and

pastel bunting. Where Hitler's Olympics had opened and closed

with cannon salutes and der Fuhrer himself presiding, these

would showcase a new, forward-looking Germany, fired with the

idealism pervading the world at the time. Security personnel,

called Olys, were to be sparse and inconspicuous, prepared for

little more than ticket fraud and drunkenness. They would wear

turquoise blazers and, during the day, carry nothing but

walkie-talkies.

The organizers asked Sieber if he might get back to them with

less-frightful scenarios--threats better scaled to the Games they

intended to stage.

Thirty years later Sieber recalls all this with neither

bitterness nor any apparent sense of vindication. He betrays

only the clinical detachment characteristic of his profession.

"The American psychologist Lionel Festinger developed the theory

of cognitive dissonance," he says. "If you have two propositions

in conflict, it's human nature to disregard one of them."

With security tossed aside, the Olympics became one big party.

Mimes, jugglers, bands and Waldi, the dachshund mascot,

gamboled through the Village, while uncredentialed interlopers

slipped easily past its gates. After late-night runs to the

Hofbrauhaus, why would virile young athletes bother to detour to

an official entrance when they could scale a chain-link fence

only 6 1/2 feet high? The Olys learned to look the other way. A

police inspector supervising security in the Village eventually

cut back nighttime patrols because, as he put it, "at night

nothing happens." Early in the Games, when several hundred young

Maoist demonstrators congregated on a hill in the Olympic Park,

guards dispersed them by distributing candy. Indeed, in a

storeroom in the Olympic Stadium, police kept bouquets of

flowers in case of another such incident. Hans-Jochen Vogel, who

as mayor had led Munich's campaign to land the Games, today

recalls the prevailing atmosphere: "People stood on the small

hills that had been carved out of the rubble from the war. They

could see into some of the venues without a ticket. And then

this fifth of September happened. Nobody foresaw such an attack."

Nobody except Sieber. To be sure, he turned out to have been

slightly off. Black September commandos climbed the fence about

50 minutes earlier than envisioned in Situation 21. To gain entry

to the Israelis' ground-floor apartment at 31 Connollystrasse,

they did not, as Sieber had imagined, have to ignite a blasting

compound because they were able to jimmy the door open. But the

rest of his details--from the commandos' demands for a prisoner

exchange and an airliner; to the eventual change of venue from

the Village; even to the two Israelis killed in the first moments

of the takeover--played out with a spooky accuracy. By the early

hours of the next day nine more Israelis were dead, along with

five of the terrorists and a Munich policeman, after an oafish

rescue attempt at a military airfield in the suburb of

Furstenfeldbruck.

Following indignant words from the paladins of the Olympic

movement, after a little mournful Beethoven, the Games of Munich

went on. It's an article of faith that The Games Must Go On. For

the 30 years since, the Olympics--indeed, all sports events of any

great scale--have carried on, even if permanently altered by the

awareness that terrorists could again strike.

To revisit the Munich attack is to go slack-jawed at the official

lassitude and incompetence, and to realize how much has changed.

The Munich organizers spent less than $2 million to make their

Games secure; in Athens two years from now the Olympic security

bill will total at least $600 million, none of which will go

toward candy or flowers. "I don't see how the Germans could have

made any mistakes that they didn't make," says Michael Hershman,

a senior executive at Decision Strategies, a Fairfax, Va.-based

security consulting firm that has been involved in five Olympics.

"Over the years Munich has served as a model of what not to do in

every conceivable way."

But today the Munich attack is irrelevant in a sense, for

terrorists are unlikely to try to duplicate it. In the

cat-and-mouse world of terrorism and counterterrorism, the bad

guys strive for audacity, as only the unthinkable will both

confound security planners and achieve what terrorists truly

hope for, which is to galvanize the attention of the world. So

organizers think and think, to close that window of

vulnerability. For the most recent Summer Games, in Sydney, they

tabletopped 800 scenarios, even as they girded for that

unthinkable 801st. "You can't prepare for everything," says Alex

Gilady, an Israeli member of the International Olympic

Committee. "In Atlanta one of the scenarios was that a bomb

would go off in Centennial Park. When you're at the barn, you

don't believe the horse will run away until it runs away."

Late on the morning of Sept. 5, 1972, several hours after the

horse had left the barn, the director of security for the Games,

Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber, told Georg Sieber that his

help was no longer needed. "[Israeli prime minister] Golda Meir

is involved," he said. "This is no longer a psychological matter,

but a political one."

At this, Sieber resigned from the department. He returned to his

home in Nymphenburg, flicked on the TV and poured a cup of

coffee.

THE PLOT:

"Consider yourself dead"

Details about the massacre in Munich have dribbled out since

1972, slowly at first, and then, over the past decade, in a

rush. First came interviews during the 1970s with the surviving

terrorists in France's Jeune Afrique and Germany's Stern. Then

came the 1978 memoir of late Black September leader Abu Iyad, in

which he explained how he handpicked the two commandos who led

the attack within the Village: Issa, who served as lead

negotiator and became known to millions of TV viewers as "the

man in the white hat"; and Tony, a short but fiery fedayee, or

"fighter for the faith," who was in charge of operations.

Excerpts from a long-suppressed Bavarian State Prosecutor's

Office report on the debacle surfaced in 1992, after an

anonymous whistle-blower leaked documents to the families of the

Israeli victims when he learned how his government had for 15

years stonewalled their efforts to learn the truth about what

happened that night. In 1999 the lone terrorist to have survived

Israel's furious revenge operation (page 66), Jamal Al-Gashey,

spoke to the producers of One Day in September, the Academy

Award-winning documentary about the attack. And another Black

Septembrist, Abu Daoud (page 65), perhaps gulled by the false

peace of the 1993 Oslo Accords, published a memoir in which he

described how he and Abu Iyad masterminded the operation. In

late July, Abu Daoud also answered SI's questions about the

attack. These accounts, most self-serving and some maddeningly

incomplete and contradictory, nonetheless reveal how a kind of

perfect storm gathered over the Munich Olympics, a confluence of

determination and naivete.

It turns out that Georg Sieber envisioned the events of Sept. 5

even before Black September had planned them. The plot wasn't

hatched until July 15, when Abu Daoud and Abu Iyad joined another

Black September leader, Abu Mohammed, at a cafe in Rome's Piazza

della Rotonda. Leafing through an Arabic newspaper, they spotted

a report that the IOC had failed even to respond to two requests

from the Palestinian Youth Federation that Palestine be permitted

to take to Munich an Olympic team of its own. "If they refuse to

let us participate, why shouldn't we penetrate the Games in our

own way?" Abu Mohammed asked. They conceived their plan, giving

it the code name Biraam and Ikrit, after two Palestinian villages

from which Zionists had evicted Arab residents in 1948.

Two days later Abu Daoud was in Munich to reconnoiter the

Olympic Village, then still under construction. On Aug. 7 he

returned, this time with Tony. Together they determined that the

commandos could hurdle the fence now ringing the Village by

jumping off one another's backs. "Each of you will boost the

other," Abu Daoud said, likening the maneuver to what tumblers

do when they dismount from human pyramids.

"But then one of us will be left behind," Tony replied.

"I'll be there to help the last man over," Abu Daoud told him.

On Aug. 24, two days before the opening ceremonies, Abu Iyad flew

from Algiers to Frankfurt via Paris with a male and a female

associate and five identical Samsonite suitcases as checked

luggage. As Abu Daoud watched through plate glass outside the

baggage claim, customs officials picked out one of the five bags

and popped it open. They saw nothing but lingerie. The female

associate looked on indignantly, which may explain why the other

four bags went uninspected. Taking a separate taxi, Abu Daoud met

Abu Iyad and his colleagues at a hotel in downtown Frankfurt,

where they consolidated the contents of the five suitcases--six

Kalashnikovs and two submachine guns, plus rounds of

ammunition--into two bags. Later that day Abu Daoud transported

the weaponry by train to Munich, where he stored it in lockers at

the railway station.

Over the following days Abu Daoud took delivery of another two

Kalashnikovs and a cache of grenades, and regularly moved the

weapons from locker to locker. And he returned once more to the

Village, this time with a Syrian woman, a friend who was

visiting a sister married to a professor in Munich. As a group

of Brazilian athletes, back from training, made their way

through one of the gates, she told the guard, in German, "My

friend here is Brazilian and just recognized an old schoolmate.

Can we say hello? Only for 10 minutes." The guard waved them

through. It made sense to pass as Brazilian, Abu Daoud says,

given his complexion and the unlikelihood that anyone would chat

him up in Portuguese. On this visit he was able to inspect the

quarters of the Saudis and the Sudanese, thereby getting a sense

of the layout of Village housing.

Two days later, back this time with Tony and Issa, Abu Daoud

approached the same guard.

"Ah! You come every day!"

"Naturally--we've come all the way from Brazil to cheer our guys

on."

The guard gestured at Abu Daoud's two companions. "Brazilians

too?" he said.

"My friends are upset with me. I told them yesterday that I'd

been able to enter the Village and meet our athletes."

"They're jealous?"

"That's why I'm asking this favor."

"Fine, go with your friends."

In his memoir Abu Daoud writes, "It couldn't have begun

better--but the best was yet to come. Five minutes later we

arrived in front of 31 Connollystrasse, and suddenly I saw a

young, tanned woman coming out the door."

She was attached to the Israeli delegation. They chatted her up,

telling her they were Brazilians who had always wanted to visit

Israel. She escorted them through the foyer by the stairwell and

through the doorway into the ground-floor apartment, a duplex

with an interior stairway. "For six or seven people, this is

sensible, don't you think?" she said. "The rest of the

delegation is in other apartments just like this." Inside, the

Palestinians took note of the details of each room, including

the locations of telephones and TV sets and the sightlines from

each window.

"She gave us a fistful of flags, and we had no recourse but to

thank her," Abu Daoud writes. "She had no way of knowing that she

had considerably facilitated our task. We now knew our first

mission would be to take control of this ground-floor apartment.

It had the most exits and controlled access to the upper floors

and basement. Once the building was taken, the commandos would

regroup here with the captured Israelis."

In the meantime six junior Palestinians--mostly shabab, "young

guys" culled from refugee camps in Lebanon--were training in

Libya, with an emphasis on hand-to-hand combat and jumping from

high walls. Black September commanders told them that they had

been selected for an unspecified mission in a foreign country.

Using fake passports, they converged on Munich in pairs soon

after the Games began. Although it is unclear where in the city

they stayed, some attended Olympic events. Only on the eve of

the attack did they assemble and learn the details of their

mission.

That evening, in his room at the Hotel Eden Wolff, near the train

station, Abu Daoud stuffed ammunition, grenades, food and a

first-aid kit into eight sport duffel bags, each graced with the

Olympic rings. He also included nylon stockings for making masks,

rope precut to use for binding hostages and a supply of the

amphetamine Predulin for keeping his men alert. Before Abu Daoud

added the Kalashnikovs, Issa and Tony kissed each of the weapons

and said, "Oh, my love!"

At 9 p.m. the Palestinians gathered at a restaurant in the train

station for final instructions. Once the Israelis had been

seized, no one was to be admitted to the building except a

senior German official who might want to check on the condition

of the hostages. Abu Daoud says he told the eight fedayeen to

exercise restraint: "The operation for which you've been chosen

is essentially a political one...to capture these Israelis

alive.... No one can deny you the right to use your weapons to

defend yourselves. Nonetheless, only fire if you truly can't do

otherwise.... It's not a matter of liquidating your enemies, but

seizing them as prisoners for future exchanges. The grenades are

for later, to impress your German negotiating partners and

defend yourselves to the death."

To which Issa added, "From now on, consider yourself dead. As

killed in action for the Palestinian cause."

Each was issued a packed duffel and a track suit with the name of

an Arab nation. Abu Daoud collected everyone's passports.

Sometime after 3:30 a.m. they took off in taxis for the Village.

As they approached the fence, they noticed another group in

warmup gear: American athletes back from a night on the town,

laughing and tipsy. Abu Daoud urged his comrades to join them,

to use the Americans' innocent comportment as cover while they

all scaled the fence. "Not only did our men mix in with the

Americans, we helped them over," he says. "And they helped us.

'Hey, man, give me your bag.' This was surreal--to see the

Americans, obviously far from imagining they were helping Black

September get into the Village."

Much of the Israeli delegation had been out on the town that

night, too--at a performance of Fiddler on the Roof.

THE TAKEOVER:

"Danger, guys! Terrorists!"

Perhaps Yossef Gutfreund was at the Games to provide security

for his fellow Israelis. Perhaps not. An Israeli government

report, commissioned by the Knesset in the aftermath of the

massacre, surely settled that question, but the earliest the

report would be made public is 2003. In its next-day account

of the incident, The New York Times suggested that both

Gutfreund, a wrestling referee, and Jacov Springer, a

weightlifting judge, doubled as security personnel. "Rubbish,"

says Gilady, the Israeli IOC member. "Simply not true."

In any case Gutfreund apparently heard the rattling of the door

at the threshold of that ground-floor duplex, the apartment the

other Israelis called the Big Wheels' Inn because it housed

senior members of the delegation. When the door cracked open in

the darkness, he could make out the barrels of several weapons.

He threw his 290 pounds against the door and shouted a warning:

"Danger, guys! Terrorists!" For critical seconds Gutfreund

succeeded in staying their entrance, allowing his roommate,

weightlifting coach Tuvia Sokolovsky, to shatter a rear window

and flee to safety through a backyard garden. But the terrorists,

using their rifle barrels to crowbar their way inside, soon had

Gutfreund subdued on the floor. Quickly they prized track coach

Amitzur Shapira and shooting coach Kehat Shorr from one

downstairs bedroom. When Issa opened the door to the other

downstairs bedroom, wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg lunged at him

with a kitchen knife that had been lying on a bedside table. Issa

stumbled to the side, unhurt, while another fedayee fired a round

from his Kalashnikov that tore through the side of Weinberg's

mouth.

The terrorists pushed their unharmed captives up the stairs of

the duplex and overpowered the two occupants of the bedroom

there, Springer and fencing coach Andre Spitzer. Leaving their

first group of captives behind, under guard, Tony and five other

fedayeen nudged Weinberg--he was able to walk, holding a scarf

to his bleeding mouth--out onto Connollystrasse and two doors

down, where another apartment filled with Israelis issued

directly onto the street. There they seized David Berger, a

weightlifter from Shaker Heights, Ohio, who had recently

immigrated to Israel (page 62); another weightlifter, Yossef

Romano, who was on crutches from an injury suffered in

competition; and wrestlers Eliezer Halfin, Mark Slavin and Gad

Tsabari. Most had heard the shot that wounded Weinberg, and,

curious, left their rooms, only to walk into captivity. The

fedayeen led their five new hostages the few steps back to join

the others.

The stairwell by that first apartment led up to other lodgings,

but also down to a parking garage. As soon as the group had

reentered the foyer, Tsabari made a dash down the stairs and into

the garage, where he zigged and zagged, taking cover behind

concrete support posts as a Palestinian shot after him. Weinberg

tried to take advantage of the chaos. He tackled one of the

fedayeen, knocking his gun free--whereupon another terrorist gave

up on Tsabari, who escaped, and finished Weinberg off.

The commandos herded their captives to the second floor of that

first duplex apartment. Romano, a Libyan-born weightlifter and

veteran of the Six Day War, gimped along, but here he threw down

his crutches and grabbed a Kalashnikov from one of the

terrorists. Another fedayee shot him dead. For the next 17 hours

the pulpy corpse of their countryman would keep the Israelis

company.

A cleaning woman on her way to work had called the Olympic

security office at 4:47 a.m. to report the sound of gunfire. An

unarmed Oly dispatched to 31 Connollystrasse found a hooded

commando with a Kalashnikov in the doorway. "What is the meaning

of this?" he demanded. The gunman ignored him, but the

intentions of Black September--a group that took its name from

the loss in September 1970 of 4,000 fedayeen in fighting in

Jordan with King Hussein's Jordanian army--would become clear

soon enough. The fedayeen rolled Weinberg's body into the street

as a sign of their seriousness.

At 5:08 a.m., a half hour before dawn would break over the

Village, two sheets of paper fluttered down from the balcony,

into the hands of a policeman. The communique listed the names of

234 prisoners held in Israeli jails, and, in a gesture to win the

sympathy of radical Europeans, those of Andreas Baader and Ulrike

Meinhof, Germany's most notorious urban guerrillas. If the lot

weren't released by 9 a.m., a hostage would be executed. "One

each hour," Issa told the policeman. "And we'll throw their

bodies into the street."

At 8:15 a.m. an equestrian event, the grand prix in dressage,

went off as scheduled.

THE STANDOFF:

"Trying to bring the dead back to life"

That morning the Germans assembled a crisis team whose

composition further underscored the shadow cast by Germany's

past. The council included both city police chief Schreiber and

West German interior minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher. To further

distance itself from the Nazi era, the West German government

strictly limited federal power, leaving responsibility for

domestic security to the country's 11 states. So the triumvirate

also included Genscher's Bavarian counterpart, Bruno

Merk--perhaps one too many cooks for a simmering broth.

Soon came word, through West German chancellor Willy Brandt, of

Meir's summary response to the Black September demands: "Under no

conditions will Israel make the slightest concession to terrorist

blackmail." That position remained firm throughout the day. The

Germans, however, desperate to buy time, would keep feeding the

Palestinians excuses: that some members of the Israeli cabinet

couldn't be reached; that not all the prisoners could be located;

that phone lines to Jerusalem had broken down.

The fedayeen knew all along that the Israelis weren't likely to

accede to their demands. Still, they extended their deadline to

noon. Issa would emerge from the building from time to time to

confer with German officials, usually with a grenade conspicuous

in his shirt pocket, its pin sometimes pulled.

The crisis team groped for a plan. First Schreiber offered the

terrorists an unlimited amount of money. Genscher, who would

later become West Germany's foreign minister, pleaded with Issa

not to subject Jews once more to death on German soil, then

offered himself as a substitute hostage. Vogel, Schreiber, Merk

and Walther Troger, the ceremonial mayor of the Olympic Village,

joined Genscher in that offer, but Issa refused. Avery Brundage,

the president of the IOC, said he recalled that in the 1920s,

the Chicago police had piped knockout gas into buildings to

overpower gangsters. But after placing fruitless calls to U.S.

police departments asking for more information, the authorities

abandoned Brundage's idea. They tried to have policemen

disguised as cooks deliver food to the compound and overpower

the terrorists, perhaps after igniting a "blitz bomb" to blind

them. But the fedayeen weren't going to fall for that; they

ordered that provisions be left at the building's threshold.

The terrorists pushed back their deadline twice more, to 3 p.m.,

then to 5, knowing that each postponement only redoubled the TV

audience. "The demand to free our imprisoned brothers had only

symbolic value," Al-Gashey would say later. "The only aim of the

action was to scare the world public during their 'happy Olympic

Games' and make them aware of the fate of the Palestinians."

In the late afternoon one more plan--to have 13 policemen

infiltrate the building through the heating ducts--advanced far

enough that the men, dressed ludicrously in track suits, began to

loosen ventilation grates on the roof. But this operation, too,

was called off, mercifully: Television cameras had long since

been trained on the building and were broadcasting the police

team's movements live to a worldwide audience, including the

fedayeen.

Shortly before 5 p.m. the terrorists made a new demand. They

wanted a jet to fly them and their captives to Cairo. "I did not

believe [the Israelis] would negotiate with us in Germany, and

that is why we made a plan to take a plane and the hostages to

another Arab country," Abu Daoud told SI. "From there I believed

they would negotiate the release of our prisoners." The freed

Palestinians were to be waiting on the tarmac in Cairo by 8 the

following morning, Issa told the Germans. If not, Black

September would execute the hostages before leaving the plane.

"These are innocent people," Genscher told Issa.

"I am a soldier," Issa said. "We are at war."

Yet here, finally, the Germans saw a potential opening. If the

crisis relocated, there would be buses and helicopters and

planes, embarkations and disembarkations, the agora of an airport

tarmac--perhaps an opportunity to draw a bead on the fedayeen. But

before going forward, the Germans wanted to make sure of two

things: that the hostages were still alive and that they were

willing to fly to Cairo.

Genscher and Troger were escorted into the second-floor room of

Apartment 1. The hostages told them that yes, if they had to be

routed through an Arab capital to freedom, they would be willing

to go. But the hostages' spokesman, Shorr, the senior member of

the delegation and a resistance fighter during World War II,

added that in such a case, they assumed that "our government

would meet the demands of the terrorists. For otherwise we would

all be shot."

"In other words," said Genscher, "if your government did not

agree to the prisoner exchange, you would not be willing to leave

German territory."

"There'd be no point to it," Shorr said.

Genscher tried a stab at bravado with his reply: "You will not be

abandoned." But to be an Israeli is to know well your

government's policy toward terrorists. Surely each hostage must

have suspected that his fate rested in the hands of the German

government--that the episode would end in Munich, not Cairo, for

better or worse.

Nonetheless, Brandt would try for hours to reach Egyptian

president Anwar Sadat, to secure permission for an aircraft to

land and a guarantee of safety for the hostages. Sadat didn't

come to the phone. Finally, at 8:20 p.m., Brandt spoke to Prime

Minister Aziz Sidky, who would not or could not pledge his

government's help.

The Egyptian response plunged the Germans back into despair. Issa

had set a final deadline, 9 p.m., and renewed his promise to kill

one hostage an hour until the Germans provided the jet. The

Israeli government would never countenance the kidnapping of its

citizens to a hostile destination. Certainly Germany, given its

history, couldn't acquiesce in such an endgame. Perhaps a jet

could appear to be at the disposal of the terrorists, but under

no circumstances could it be permitted to take off.

The Germans entertained one last plan to liberate the hostages

before they were to be helicoptered out of the Village to this

supposed jet to Cairo. Schreiber proposed to place police gunmen

behind the concrete pillars of the underground garage, the same

obstructions that had saved Gad Tsabari's life. The police would

pick off the fedayeen while they walked the hostages from the

apartment complex to the helicopters. But a suspicious Issa

demanded that the transfer be by bus; the bus pulled up to the

doorway, and the fedayeen with their captives piled directly into

the vehicle, affording the police no clear shot. Moments later,

in the plaza of the Village, 17 captors and captives boarded two

Iroquois helicopters.

By now, the crisis team had essentially accepted the hostages'

deaths as inevitable. "We were 99 percent sure that we wouldn't

be able to achieve our objective," Schreiber would later say. "We

felt like doctors trying to bring the dead back to life."

No Israelis survive to dispute him, but if you believe

Al-Gashey, the mood on board the helicopter was lighter, if only

from the change of scenery. "Everyone seemed to be relaxed, even

the Israelis," he has said of the flight to Furstenfeldbruck.

"For our part, in the air we had the feeling that somehow we had

achieved what we'd wanted. For the first time I really thought

about the hostages sitting so close--in physical contact. My

cousin [Adnan Al-Gashey, another commando] was talking above the

noise of the blades with an Israeli about personal things. I

think they talked about his wife and kids. Even the Israelis

realized our lives were inextricably linked.

"I remembered our orders to kill the hostages if it were to

become a hopeless military situation. But I also thought how

nobody had trained us how to kill bound, unarmed people."

THE SHOOTOUT:

"Condemned to fail from the beginning"

Schreiber had entrusted the operation at Furstenfeldbruck to his

deputy, Georg Wolf, and Wolf had a plan. The two helicopters

would land 100 or so yards from a Lufthansa 727 ostensibly ready

to fly to Cairo. After the terrorists brought their captives

over to the plane, 17 police officers, some disguised as crew,

would ambush them--if, that is, police sharpshooters couldn't

get a clear shot at the fedayeen as they made their way across

the tarmac.

But on the plane, not 15 minutes before the helicopters touched

down, the policemen were in an uproar over what they regarded as

a suicide mission. Most of the officers were to be holed up in

the rear of the aircraft, where they believed a single terrorist

grenade could incinerate them. As for the officers posing as

pilots, they would be in the line of fire from the police at the

rear of the plane--and were unpersuasively disguised besides,

having been issued incomplete Lufthansa uniforms. After hearing

them out, the officer in charge, Reinhold Reich, polled his men,

who voted unanimously to abandon the mission. It was a mutiny

inconceivable to an Israeli, and Ankie Spitzer, Andre Spitzer's

widow, still fumes at the Germans' lack of courage. But West

Germany, not to be trusted with soldiers and guns, had no special

forces unit, nothing like Israel's Sayeret Matkal or the U.S.

Army's Delta Force.

With the helicopters moments from touchdown, Wolf's plan, such as

it was, now rested on the police sharpshooters--five of them.

The helicopter pilots had flitted about the sky to give the

Germans time to prepare the assault and permit a third

helicopter, carrying Schreiber, Genscher and Merk, to beat the

others to the airfield.

"Lousy thing to happen at the last minute," Schreiber told Wolf

when he found him.

"What lousy thing?" asked Wolf.

"That there are eight of them."

"What? You don't mean there are eight Arabs?"

"You mean you're just finding that out from me?"

Wolf was. For unknown reasons, he thought that there were only

five terrorists. No one had told him that three postal workers

headed for work that morning had seen the Palestinians scaling

the fence and had already provided police with their best guess

as to the number: seven or eight, according to two of the

postmen; 10 or 12, according to the third. In the underground

garage, a policeman had counted the eight terrorists boarding

the bus.

Yet now, critically, the snipers didn't know they were

outnumbered, even though German TV had reported the postal

workers' accounts. Schreiber's testimony to investigators from

the Bavarian prosecutor's office as to why he hadn't focused

early in the day on the number of terrorists would reflect the

crossed signals characterizing the operation: "I was sure

somebody"--somebody else--"would count them as soon as an

opportunity presented itself."

Now the plan rested on the accuracy of five sharpshooters, none

of whom deserved the title. Two had been picked from the

Bavarian riot police. The other three were Munich police

officers. None had any special training. All had been chosen

simply because they shot competitively on weekends.

Nevertheless, three took positions on the terrace of the control

tower. A fourth lay on the tarmac, behind a low concrete parapet.

The fifth took cover behind a fire truck.

The helicopters touched down at 10:35 p.m. The four pilots and

six of the fedayeen emerged. As other Black Septembrists held the

pilots at gunpoint, Issa and Tony walked over to inspect the jet.

Their suspicions already aroused by the lengthy helicopter

transfer, they must have gone on full alert when they found the

plane empty. As they jogged hastily back toward the helicopters,

Wolf gave the order to open fire.

The events that followed are still a Rashomon-like fog of chaos,

gore and contradiction. This much seems likely, however: Gunfire

filled the air for the first four minutes. With six terrorists

visible, snipers killed two and mortally wounded a third. But the

other three, including Issa and Tony, scrambled to safety. As the

pilots dashed for cover, the Palestinian survivors of that first

fusillade ducked beneath and behind the helicopters, from where

they shot out as many of the airport lights as they could. Anton

Fliegerbauer, a police brigadier posted near a window at the base

of the control tower, took a fatal bullet.

That flurry of gunfire gave way to an eerie stalemate of more

than an hour, during which neither side got off more than a few

shots. At this point some sort of SWAT team might have stormed

the Palestinian positions. But a police "special assault unit,"

helicoptered in about an hour after the shooting began, for some

reason landed at the far end of the airfield, more than a mile

from the action, and was never deployed. "The biggest failure

was not having enough sharpshooters," says Ulrich Wegener, a

lieutenant colonel in the Bundeswehr who served as Genscher's

aide-de-camp that day and went on to lead the GSG-9, the

special-forces unit that the West German government established

within two weeks of the fiasco. "The second biggest failure was

not having special forces that could storm the helicopters."

Alternatively, German forces might have attacked with armored

personnel carriers. But six such carriers ordered to the scene

had gotten stuck in traffic, much of it caused by curiosity

seekers flocking to Furstenfeldbruck, as if it were the venue for

another Olympic event. One carrier had mistakenly lit out for

Riem, Munich's civilian airport, on the other side of town, as

had scores of police. In a Keystone Kops moment, the driver of

one police car happened to hear the correct destination on the

radio, slammed on the brakes and caused a pileup.

Just before midnight the carriers finally arrived to bear down on

the helicopters. Only here did the hostages lose their lives, to

judge by what can be pieced together from portions of that

long-suppressed Bavarian prosecutor's office report. A terrorist

strafed the four hostages inside one helicopter, killing

Springer, Halfin and Ze'ev Friedman and wounding Berger. Then he

sprang to the ground, wheeled, and flung a grenade back into the

cockpit before being shot dead as he fled.

Before fire from that explosion reached the fuel tank and turned

the helicopter into an inferno, Issa emerged defiantly from

beneath the other chopper with Kalashnikov blazing, strafing the

Germans. Police killed him and a second fedayeen with return

fire. At this point another commando, believed to be Jamal

Al-Gashey's cousin Adnan, raked the remaining five

hostages--Gutfreund, Schorr, Slavin, Spitzer and Shapira--with

fatal gunfire.

Berger would be the last hostage to die. He had taken two

nonlethal bullets in his lower extremities, only to perish of

smoke inhalation. (Firefighters at one point braved gunfire to

douse the helicopter with foam but were forced to retreat to

cover.) Three fedayeen, alive and largely unhurt, lay on their

stomachs nearby, two of them playing dead. They were captured,

and 40 minutes later, with the help of dogs and tear gas, police

tracked Tony to the refuge he had taken beneath a railroad car on

the fringe of the airfield, killing him during a brief gun

battle.

The last shot, fired at about 12:30 a.m., ended nearly three

hours of an operation that, as an official involved later put

it, "was condemned to fail from the beginning." To this day the

Germans have never satisfactorily explained why they didn't

deploy two or three snipers for each terrorist. The gunmen had

neither precision rifles nor bulletproof vests. The military

airfield was only moderately lit, so the police had erected

three mobile lighting towers, but on this moonless night the

towers cast stark shadows, as did the helicopters' long rotor

blades, and none of the snipers had been issued night-vision

goggles. Several nights later, during a reconstruction exercise,

members of a team from the Bavarian prosecutor's office

positioned themselves exactly where the five police gunmen had

been. With night-vision goggles, each was able to distinguish

figures within the helicopters.

Indeed, the police shot as much in the figurative as the literal

dark. They hadn't merely been kept ignorant of how many

terrorists to expect; no one had told them precisely where the

helicopters would be landing and hence what might be the optimal

positions to take up. "The helicopters landed directly in front

of me and thus exactly in the line of fire of the shooters on the

tower," the policeman behind the concrete parapet told the

inquiry of the prosecutor's office. "Had I known they were

landing where they actually did, I would have chosen another

position."

Finally, the policemen had no two-way radios with which to

coordinate an operation that had to take out the commandos

virtually at a stroke. When Wolf, from his post in the tower,

gave the order to fire, only three gunmen were in a position to

hear him; the other two, who were to begin shooting when they

noticed the first three doing so, found themselves in the line of

fire of their comrades and had to take cover. So in effect three

riflemen were left to take out the eight terrorists. That trio's

shooting was only enough to disable three of the fedayeen

immediately and to alert the other five that the day's

negotiations had been a ruse.

In their negligence suit the families of the victims charged that

saving the hostages became subordinate to Brundage's desire to

remove the crisis from the Olympic Village. Wegener suggests as

much. "The Village," he says, "was like a church, a cathedral."

It was almost as if the Germans had said, There's no way we can

save the hostages. Let's at least save the Games.

Even as the shootout continued at the airport, a rumor had

cruelly mutated into fact. At 11 p.m. Conrad Ahlers, a spokesman

for the West German federal government, told reporters that all

the hostages had been liberated. The wire services sent this

misinformation around the world, and Israeli newspapers hit the

streets on Sept. 6 repeating it in banner headlines. Even Golda

Meir went to bed believing the Germans had freed the nine

captives.

On the morning of the 6th the grim truth became known. "Until

today, we always thought of Dachau as being near Munich," said

Israeli interior minister Josef Burg. "From now on,

unfortunately, we'll say that Munich is near Dachau."

Willi Daume, the president of the Munich organizing committee, at

first wanted the remainder of the Games called off, but Brundage

and others talked him out of it. "I too questioned the decision

to continue," says Vogel, the former mayor of Munich, "but over

time I came to believe that we couldn't let the Olympics come to

a halt from the hand of terrorism."

So, after a memorial service on Sept. 6, the Carefree Games

resumed. Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium

for West Germany's soccer match with Hungary carried noisemakers

and waved flags, while authorities did nothing to intervene in

the name of decorum. Yet when several spectators unfurled a

banner reading 17 dead, already forgotten? security sprang into

action. Officials seized the sign and expelled the offenders from

the grounds.

It's part of the protocol of every Olympics that organizers

shall publish an official report of great scope and heft.

Munich's is Teutonically comprehensive. It praises Mark Spitz

for his feats in the pool and Olga Korbut for hers on the mats,

and the informal Olympic Village for its contribution to the

relaxed spirit of the Games. And it recounts the atrocities

perpetrated on members of the Israeli delegation in

dispassionate, mostly exculpatory prose. Then it adds this

grotesque rationalization: "After the terrible events of

September 5, 1972, it was once again the atmosphere of the

Olympic Village which contributed a great deal to calming down

and preserving peace among the athletes."

THIRTY YEARS LATER: "This will be a very secure place"

Today most of the apartment block at 31 Connollystrasse is

filled with middle-class Germans going about the banal business

of living. Well-tended flowers spill from windowsills. A young

girl prances off with her bicycle. A memorial plaque by the

main doorway is in temporary storage, but it will return in the

spring, after renovations are complete on the pedestrian-only

street.

If you know what went on there, however, the scene hints at the

sinister. The plastic tape of the construction cordon suggests

the crime scene the spot once was. Chain-link fencing is a

reminder of what the Black Septembrists scaled to steal into the

Village. On the side of the building, faded graffiti evokes the

ferment of another time, of shouted slogans and violent means.

The door that leads from the street to the foyer and stairwell is

locked. During the 1972 Olympics that door was never locked.

The entryway and apartment where Moshe Weinberg and Yossef

Romano were murdered now belong to the Max Planck Institute, a

scientific think tank. A sign reads please respect the privacy

of our guests. "Of course we all know what happened," one of the

three residents, all Russian scientists on contract with the

institute, recently told a stranger who knocked on his door

anyway, "but none of us knows exactly where the guys were

murdered. We don't want to know. If we knew, it would make it

very hard to live here."

In their negligence suit the families of the victims argued that

the Germans should have anticipated some attack. If it wasn't

enough that Georg Sieber laid out the entire plan, Black

September had staged five operations in Europe over the previous

10 months, including three in West Germany, and, the families

allege, German intelligence sources had received at least three

reports between Aug. 21 and Sept. 2 of Palestinian terrorists

flowing into the region. Early in 2001 the Germans, who the

families say had for years denied that a report on the disaster

even existed, finally settled with the families, offering a pool

of $3 million in compensation, to be paid out in equal thirds by

the German, Bavarian and Munich governments. (This was in

addition to bereavement funds of $1 million doled out by the

German Red Cross in the immediate aftermath of the attack.) But

the families have yet to receive any money from this

"humanitarian" fund, and they believe that the Germans haven't

released all the evidence that exists. Moreover, they still wait

for an expression of remorse or responsibility. "If they would

only say to us, 'Look, we tried, we didn't know what we were

doing, we didn't mean for what happened to happen, we're

sorry'--that would be the end of it," says Ankie Spitzer. "But

they've never even said that."

Sieber has never again worked with an organizing committee for a

sporting event. "It's nothing but frustration," he says. "The

officials aren't able to develop a tradition because everyone is

a rookie. Nine out of 10 aren't paid--they're volunteers--and

the paid professional can't lead them. If you're not a

professional, you incur no risk, take no responsibility. This

disaster in Munich, it was a horror trip, the whole thing, a

chain of catastrophes large and small. Who paid? O.K., the

German government paid, but of those individuals who were

responsible, no one paid. We can't change the past. But more

important, we're not learning for the future, because nothing's

really different."

In fact Munich changed forever how the Olympics are conducted.

Athletes at the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid stayed in a

Village built to be so secure that it was eventually converted

into a prison. Later that year, in Moscow, the Soviets X-rayed

every piece of incoming luggage at the airport and deployed

240,000 militiamen to show they meant business. Though the

U.S.S.R.'s boycott of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles was

surely payback to the U.S. for passing up those Moscow Games,

the Soviets claimed they stayed home because of inadequate

security, even as the L.A. Olympics introduced such gadgets as a

remote-controlled robot that could examine suspicious objects.

Sixteen years ago the IOC began to collect and share information

related to security and in 1997 formally established a "transfer

of knowledge" program so Olympic know-how--from the food tasters

for athletes in Seoul to the palm-print recognition technology

in Atlanta--could be passed from one organizing committee to the

next. To help Athens prepare for 2004, security experts from

Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Spain and the U.S.

are collaborating with Olympic organizers and the Greek

authorities.

If you accept Santayana's maxim that those who fail to remember

the past are condemned to repeat it, you could argue that

Munich organizers recalled their past all too well, thereby

inviting a horror of a different sort. But while the Greeks have

their own historical baggage, they seem to be toting it more

lightly. The military junta that ruthlessly ruled from 1967 to

'74 was detested by most Greeks, who pride themselves on living

in the birthplace of democracy. A homegrown terrorist group,

November 17, took its name from a bloody student uprising on

that date in 1973, and over the past three decades its members

have targeted various representatives of Western governments

that supported that military rule, including the United States.

November 17 has claimed responsibility for more than 100 attacks

that have killed 22 people and wounded scores of others, yet

there hadn't been a single arrest in 26 years.

Then, in June, police caught a break. A bomb accidentally

exploded in Piraeus, the port of Athens, gravely injuring the man

carrying it. Tips poured in, and over the next several weeks

police raided November 17 hideouts, seized weapons and charged at

least 10 people with involvement in the group. A senior Western

diplomatic official posted in Athens also points approvingly to

the government's plan to deploy at least 7,000 armed troops in

the streets during the Games. "The public reaction to that

announcement was silence," he says. "Given the aversion of the

average citizen here to anything that smacks of the junta, that

was a big, big sign. But then this is a post-9/11 Olympics, and

9/11 changed the way all of us look at the world. Plus, people

take a lot of pride in being Greek. They want to look good in the

eyes of the world."

Those in the security field believe that no group poses a greater

threat to the 2004 Olympics than al-Qaeda. Many experts suspect

that "Afghan alumni" have joined up with al-Qaeda cells in

Albania, the anarchic, predominantly Muslim nation that abuts

Greece to the north. The challenge will be to secure a country

that has long been a transfer point between Europe and the Middle

East--to protect not only Greece's rugged mountain borders, but

also thousands of miles of coastline and hundreds of ports. As

one Israeli counterterrorism expert puts it, "It's so much easier

to bounce from the Middle East to a barren island in Greece and

then make your way to Athens than to travel halfway around the

globe to prepare for an attack in Sydney."

The concrete structures of Athens' Olympic Village are sprouting

at the base of Mount Parnis, on the northern edge of the city.

Builders and suppliers desperately try to keep to a schedule,

despite several work stoppages and four on-the-job deaths. Most

of the 2,300 workers on the site are Greek, but scores of them

aren't. "We don't screen everyone," says Katerina Barbosa, an

official with the private company building the Village. "But at

this point we have nothing to fear. By the end of the year this

will be a very secure place."

Sieber is out of the business of tabletopping the Olympics and

refuses to talk specifically about Athens. But he brings up one

of his 30-year-old scenarios, one that might give Greek

organizers pause, especially in light of the dynamite and hand

grenade discovered early this month buried next to the 1896

Olympic stadium, which is slated to be used as a venue in 2004.

"[The Basque separatist group] ETA is very patient," Sieber says,

his imagination vivid as ever. "They pick out a man they want to

kill. They send one of their operatives, disguised as a worker,

to the construction site for his new home and plant a bomb. For

several years they do nothing. Then one morning, perhaps after he

is married, with a family, they detonate it by radio. He finds

himself up in the sky."

B/W PHOTO: AP (INSET) [COVER INSET] SPECIAL REPORT MUNICH, 1972 WHEN TERROR BEGAN --How It Happened --Chilling Lessons for Today --The Mastermind Speaks

B/W PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY RAYMOND DEPARDON/MAGNUM

COLOR MAP: MAP: STEVE STANKIEWICZ THE SETTING The attack began in the Olympic Village but came to a tragic conclusion 20 hours later at a military airport 12 miles awayOLYMPIC VILLAGE 31 Connollystrasse 4:30 a.m.: Hostages seized; two Israelis die 10 p.m.: Terrorists and hostages leave by bus for a helicopter to a waiting jet Lufthansa jet Furstenfeldbruck airport 10:45 p.m.- 12:30 a.m.: Airport battle leaves nine hostages, five terrorists and one policeman dead

B/W PHOTO: AP PHOTO (TOP)

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN MOSHE WEINBERG Wrestling coach and new father at age 33, was the first of the 11 Israelis to be killed.

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (HALFIN, SHAPIRA) ELIEZER HALFIN Lightweight freestyle wrestler, 24, was among the Israelis to die at the airfield.

B/W PHOTO: RAYMOND DEPARDON/MAGNUM (BALCONY)

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (HALFIN, SHAPIRA) AMITZUR SHAPIRA Track coach, 40, was among the hostages killed at the airport shootout.

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (SPITZER, ROMANO) ANDRE SPITZER Romanian-born fencing coach, 30, had become a father on eve of the Games.

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (SPITZER, ROMANO) YOSSEF ROMANO Tripoli-born lifter, 32, injured in Games, was on crutches when attacks came.

B/W PHOTO: AP (ROOM)

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (SLAVIN) MARK SLAVIN Russian-born Greco-Roman wrestler, 18, was among Israel's best athletes.

B/W PHOTO: CORBIS/BETTMANN (HELICOPTER)

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (GUTFREUND, SPRINGER) YOSSEF GUTFREUND Wrestling referee, 40 and 290 pounds, blocked door when terrorists attacked.

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (GUTFREUND, SPRINGER) JACOV SPRINGER Polish-born weightlifting judge, 52, had lost family in the Holocaust.

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (FRIEDMAN, SHORR) ZE'EV FRIEDMAN Weightlifter, 28, placed 12th in the bantamweight division at Games.

B/W PHOTO: ISRAEL SUN (FRIEDMAN, SHORR) KEHAT SHORR Rifle coach, 53, had been pistol champ of Romania and WWII resistance fighter.

B/W PHOTO: AP