Munich 72: the end of innocence

LONDON - For various reasons, all considered compelling, security at the 1972 Olympics in Munich was minimal. Indeed, by comparison, the Vatican's ceremonial Swiss Guards might be described as a ring of steel.

High security, it was argued, would go against the spirit of the 20th Olympic Games of the Modern Era - christened the Games of Joy and Peace.

There was another problem. You could not have guards bristling with weaponry, still less barbed-wire fences, in a land that 27 years earlier had been home to Belsen, Ravensbruck and, just down the road from the Olympic Village, Dachau.

So the Games that were to celebrate democratised, de-Nazified Germany, led by the liberal Willy Brandt, were guarded by an unarmed security force of 2000 in light-blue uniforms. In their "village," the athletes lived in the cocoon they invariably build against the working realities of the world. They trained, discoed, made new friends, new lovers. And all the time they were utterly oblivious to the mortal danger heading their way.

At 4 am on September 5 local time - 28 years ago today NZT - a group of carousing Americans clambered over a 2m boundary wall, providing perfect cover for some new companions, also dressed in tracksuits.

But these "athletes," rather oddly, were carrying bags packed not with running shoes and towels but with AK-47s and grenades.

The intruders were eight members of Black September, a splinter group of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and as the Americans staggered off to their apartments, they moved surely to their destination - the quarters of the Israeli team on Connolly Strasse. They knew where they were going because their leaders, Lutiff Afit (Issa) and Yusuf Nazal (Tony), had been working at the village for months as an engineer and a cook.

They entered through the unlocked door of one of the suites of the Israeli delegation. Some of the Israelis fled, some resisted. Two were killed and nine - four wrestlers and weightlifters, five coaches and referees - were taken hostage.

Four hours later, a German policewoman named Annaliese Graes asked the masked Lutiff Afit: "What kind of rubbish is this?"

He told her of the hostages and demanded the immediate release of 234 prisoners held in Israeli prisons and two in German prisons - the notorious terrorists Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

What followed over the next 19 hours changed the Olympics and the world.

Bombs in Harrods and fragments of airliners falling from the sky may now be relatively commonplace, but in 1972 some of the world's most comfortable certainties were about to be swept away.

The German authorities were unequal, both emotionally and professionally, to the crisis. Brandt's Interior Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, understood the scale of the problem and its global implications, and he performed with much personal honour, immediately flying to the scene and volunteering to take the place of the hostages.

But under the German federal system, Genscher's powers were limited and the local Bavarian authorities could produce only a fatal mixture of clownish panic and pompous concern to resist encroachments on their own power.

The result was a hideous black comedy. One early, swiftly aborted "rescue mission" involved Government snipers taking position on the roof of the Israeli building in full view of television cameras. Black September, along with the rest of the world, was watching TV.

Eventually, after hours of tortuous negotiation, it was agreed that the terrorists would be flown out of Munich with their prisoners on a Boeing 727, while the Germans planned another attempt to break the hostages loose.

It was a bloody farce, pitifully executed. Police dressed as aircrew were to have led the attack, but after settling into the plane they realised that there was every chance they would shoot one another and, having reached this conclusion, they retreated.

This left five snipers, who were not equipped with bulletproof vests, to take on eight highly trained, hugely committed terrorists. It did not help that one of the snipers was placed in the direct line of fire of three of his colleagues.

In the shootout, all nine Israelis, five terrorists and one German died.

Along with them perished the innocence of the Olympic Games.

George Habash of the PLO would later say: "A bomb in the White House, a mine in the Vatican, an earthquake in Paris - none could have produced the far-reaching echo to every man in the world like the operation of Black September in Munich."

In fact, there were two horrors in Munich. One involved the death of innocent athletes. The other was the contempt for real life exhibited by the leader of the Olympic movement - the venerable American plutocrat Avery Brundage.

Impatient with the unscheduled delay to the Games, he demanded a swift resolution, and when, in the pursuit of that objective, the hostages died, he refused to consider the case for abandoning the Games.

He rejected, with what many saw as mind-numbing contempt, the argument that you could not, as the sports writer Hugh McIlvanney noted, "have a circus in a graveyard."

So the Games staggered on to a luridly playful, balloon-bedecked closing ceremony. Brundage said it was what the fallen Israeli athletes would have wanted. In that simple, bald sentence, some believe that Avery Brundage forever compromised the moral base of the Olympic movement.

That, certainly, was the belief of Debbie Brill, the brilliant teenage Canadian high jumper who would later break a world record but in Munich found herself competing in a daze.

"A team-mate was awakened by the sound of shots, but she didn't think much of it," Brill recalls. "People were practising all the time, and she assumed she was hearing starting guns. But around 8 am we realised something quite grotesque was happening.

"There was some talk of a raid on the Israeli quarters and of hostages being taken. We didn't know then that people had been killed. The police had cordoned off the Israeli block, but we could see the activity outside: the snipers, the conferences between officials, police and the military.

"Minute by minute, it became more horrifying. People crowded around TV sets, exchanging information and wild rumours. We shared a strong feeling of violation." Suddenly, nothing could be taken for granted. After the news came in that there had been a shootout at the airport and that all the hostages had died, most of the athletes were numb for some time. People walked around like zombies.

"That reaction was quite natural, I suppose, but what happened the following day was strange. It seemed that many athletes had decided, along with the Olympic authorities, to dismiss the reality of what had happened. Their attitude was that it was terribly sad, but that life, and the Olympics, had to go on.

"Looking back, I can see the logic in that, but emotionally it is horrifying. I had an argument with my coach when I told him I didn't want to compete. He was appalled that I was considering dropping out and he persuaded me to compete, but I just couldn't concentrate

"At the memorial service for the Israelis, Brundage said the Games were all about overcoming hurdles and the fallen athletes would have wanted us to continue to compete. We couldn't let them down.

"I turned to an athlete and said: 'God, we're talking about people who've been killed. Don't let them down? They're dead!"'

Four years before Munich, in Mexico City, there had been a foretaste of the "pragmatism" of the Olympic bosses.

In the runup to the Mexican Games, protesting students were shot down by Government forces. The official death toll was 32, but some estimates ran as high as 300.

Relatives of the dead were asked to produce identification, and some reported that the only result was the shredding of the documents.

But the blood was washed away and the 1968 Games went on, stupendous Games in which the American long jumper Bob Beamon leaped to a stunning world record in the high, thin air; David Hemery raced for British gold; George Foreman, the future world heavyweight champion, pounded his way to first place; and American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the famous Black Panther salute from the winners' podium.

But at what price did the spectacle come? The underpinning of a brutal police state.

In Mexico, however, the Olympic chiefs could say the integrity of the Games had not been physically breached. In Munich, Black September had hopped over a wall and done their ruthless work right there in the athletes' village.

Of course, there had been another famous assault on the spirit of the Games, also on German soil, in Berlin in 1936, when Hitler strutted and fumed as Jesse Owens, the black American sprinter, made a joke of the Nazis' Aryan master-race theory.

But that was a triumph for the Games. Munich was a defeat, not so much because of the abject failures of security, but because any goal beyond the life at any price of the Olympics themselves had been pushed aside.

That life has been compromised so many times since the invasion by the terrorists - not least in the past few years, when the present Olympic president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, has survived a tide of documented corruption, most brazenly in the awarding of the Winter Games of 2002 to Salt Lake City.

In Montreal in 1976, tearful young African athletes were ordered back to the airport by their Governments even as the opening parade wound around the stadium. Moscow in 1980 was denied to the Americans, Los Angeles in 1984 to the Russians and most of Eastern Europe. Seoul in 1988 saw the fall of the steroid-pumped Ben Johnson.

And if, four years later, the Barcelona Games were relatively unscathed, Atlanta in 1996 had a bomb and commercial exploitation that would raise eyebrows in a backstreet bazaar.

But still the Olympic flame flickers on.

We can only relish the best and live with the rest. That was the life sentence imposed by, among others, the gunmen of Black September.

- INDEPENDENT

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