Israeli Olympic athletes and coaches held hostage in their hotel room by members of the Black September terrorist organization, 1972.
“Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem. I have set her in the center of the nations, with countries round-about her.” - Ezekiel 5:5
This is part twenty-one of the FAI Publishing series Center of Nations which examines the history of the modern State of Israel in the midst of an increasingly hostile world.
The Palestinian KGB AGENT and His Nazi Friend
By the spring of 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had become the international poster children for the Palestinian cause. Their audacious terrorist attacks, including several successful airline hijackings, had captured international headlines. Despite the disapproval of Yasser Arafat, leader of the Fatah Party and recently elected head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the armed wing of the PFLP continued to execute its plans under the leadership of Wadie Haddad. A “valuable agent” of the KGB, Hadad was also an associate of François Genoud, a neo-Nazi Swiss financier with a sordid past.
A portrait of François Genoud in his Nazi uniform.
A committed devotee of Adolf Hitler, François Genoud had travelled extensively to the Middle East during the Second World War as an emissary of the Third Reich, where he met several times with Jerusalem’s Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, for whom Genoud was a financial manager. He was also executor of Joseph Goebbel’s will. After the war, Genoud become a key steward of Nazi assets which had not been seized by the USSR or the Allies. He was also a key facilitator of ODESSA, an underground operation to smuggle Nazi leadership and SS officers from Europe to friendly nations such as Argentina.
Genoud became a financial and logistical supporter of the PLO in the 1960’s, connecting Palestinian Arab leaders with former SS officers who provided training to PLO militias. Genoud formed a friendship with George Habash, the political leader of the PFLP, and also became acquainted with Wadie Haddad. Genoud’s investment in the PFLP was so ardent that he financed the legal defense of PFLP terrorists after they were apprehended in a foiled hijacking attempt in 1969. With both Soviet KGB and neo-Nazi support at his disposal, Wadie Haddad had more than enough to plot his most ambitious terrorist attack to date.
FROM DAWSON’S FIELD TO REVOLUTIONARY AIRPORT
On September 6, 1970, PFLP starlet Leila Khaled and her Nicaraguan boyfriend boarded El Al flight 219 during a layover in Amsterdam. Shortly after takeoff, the couple attempted to hijack the airplane with a pistol and grenades, but were unable to access the cockpit, and were instead subdued by a sky marshal and civilian passengers. Khaled’s boyfriend was shot and killed, and she was arrested and jailed by the British government after the plane made an emergency landing in London.
Two other PFLP hijackers had planned to join Khaled and her partner on El Al 219 but were stopped by Israeli security in Amsterdam for carrying suspicious passports. Instead, the two boarded Pan Am Flight 93 with 169 souls aboard and successfully hijacked it, forcing the plane to divert and land in Cairo, Egypt, where the passengers were evacuated from the plane shortly before it was blown up by the hijackers, who were subsequently arrested by Egyptian authorities.
Two other airliners were also successfully hijacked on the same day by PFLP terrorists, TWA Flight 741 and Swissair Flight 100, including a combined 306 passengers and crew. After a forced landing in Beirut to pick up more accomplices and at least 20 kilograms of dynamite, both planes were landed at Dawson’s Field in the Kingdom of Jordan. While 125 passengers and crew were taken to a hotel in the capital city of Amman, all Israeli, American, West German and Swiss passengers were kept at their airfield and paraded before the international press the following day. The PFLP demanded the release of all “political prisoners” from Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of their hostages, renaming Dawson’s Field as “Revolutionary Airport.”
Two days after the hijackings, US President Richard Nixon met with his senior cabinet members and advisors about the status of American hostages at Dawson’s Field. Nixon wanted the US Air Force to bomb PFLP bases in Jordan, but was told that the weather was not favorable for such an operation. Instead, elements of the US Army and Navy were deployed to the Mideast theater to prepare for a military strike. But US intervention would not be necessary this time.
By 1970, Fatah, the PFLP, and other parties in the PLO had been operating inside Jordan for more than three years. In that time, they had earned an unfavorable reputation amongst non-Palestinians across Jordanian society, especially in Amman. One Jordanian man described the PLO fedayeen this way:
“They drove noisily around Amman in jeeps with loaded weapons, like an army of occupation; they extorted financial contributions from individuals, sometimes foreigners, in their homes and in public places; they disregarded routine traffic regulations, failed to register and license their vehicles, and refused to stop at army checkpoints; they boasted about their role of destiny against Israel and belittled the worth of the army. Their very presence in Amman, far from the battlefield, seemed like a challenge to the regime.”
The explosion of three airliners on the tarmac at Dawson’s Field, 1970.
By early 1970, some fedayeen leaders were even openly calling for the overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy, led by King Hussein bin Talal. Both Hussein’s government and military had already grown weary of the PLO presence on Jordanian soil, but Hussein was reticent to expel the fedayeen out of the country, for fear of stoking an uprising amongst Jordan’s large Palestinian population. Instead, he made several attempts to restrict the PLO inside the country, which proved mostly ineffective. But the calculus changed after the PFLP commandeered Dawson’s Field and used it as a stage for terrorist press conferences and hostage parades. Four days after the hijackings, violence broke out between PFLP terrorists and Jordanian security forces at the hotel in Amman where hostages were being held. Then on September 12th, the PFLP used their large cache of dynamite to explode the three empty airliners on the tarmac at Dawson’s Field as press cameras were rolling, creating an international spectacle. These two events were the last straw for King Hussein’s government. The entire PLO had to go.
On September 16th, King Hussein declared martial law and the Jordanian military entered the capital of Amman and several other cities across Jordan where PLO bases were located. PLO positions in Palestinian refugee camps were shelled continuously by Jordanian tanks, mortars and artillery for ten days straight. It appeared that Yasser Arafat’s days in Jordan were numbered, except that the Soviet Union was not about to sacrifice their most valuable proxy against the United States and Israel in the Middle East. The Soviet-aligned Syrian regime was leveraged to intervene one day after the Jordanian offensive began. Over 10,000 Syrian troops wearing the insignia of the “Palestinian Liberation Army” crossed the border with a mechanized division of 300 tanks to “liberate” the embattled fedayeen in the city of Irbid. However, Jordanian forces responded swiftly to cut off the Syrians and force them out of Irbid and back across the border in a well-coordinated air and ground campaign that included flyovers by the Israeli Air Force.
The month of September, 1970 only continued to worsen for the PLO after the failed Syrian intervention. The airliner hostages were subsequently rescued by Jordanian authorities or released by the PFLP in exchange for the release of Leila Khaled and several other PFLP militants, an outcome which fell far short of the initial demand for the release of all Arab “political prisoners” from Israeli prisons. Under pressure from his Egyptian and Iraqi counterparts, King Hussein signed a ceasefire with Arafat on September 27th. But the writing was on the wall for the PLO in Jordan. After twenty-one days of terrorism and military confrontation, the month of Black September was only the beginning of a seismic shift in the landscape of the ongoing Israeli-Arab conflict.
THE REVENGE OF BLACK SEPTEMBER
The tenuous peace between Jordan’s King Hussein and Yasser Arafat’s PLO only lasted a few months. In January 1971, the Jordanian military resumed its offensive across the country, and the fedayeen were driven out of the cities and eventually surrounded near the city of Ajlun in July. The PLO’s defeat in the Black September conflict was a humiliating one. Instead of using its camps in Jordan as a springboard to overthrow the Hashemite dynasty and launch a new war against the State of Israel, it was politically isolated and exiled from Jordan into Lebanon.
However, a faction of the PLO remained in Jordan and continued to fight in early 1971. Led by Abu Ali Iyad, one of the founding members of Fatah with Yasser Arafat, the resistance eventually failed and Abu Iyad was executed in July, 1971. Fatah leadership met in Damascus, Syria two months later to formulate a response. The result was the creation of a “special operations” group which would provide an outlet of violence to the more extreme elements of the party that had followed Abu Iyad, striking at the PLO’s enemies while providing a layer of separation that would give Fatah and the PLO plausible deniability. The unit was named Black September, after the conflict for which it was created to avenge.
The Black September organization was designed as a series of isolated terrorist cells which were kept operationally separate from one another. Initially made up of extremist members of Fatah, it grew to include members of Waddie Haddad’s militia in the PFLP and the Syrian-sponsored party in the PLO. The operational head of Black September was Ali Hassan Salameh, the head of Yasser Arafat’s personal security force. Under his leadership, the organization executed a series of terrorist attacks between 1971-73 which included the assassination of the Jordanian prime minister in revenge for the death of Abu Iyad, the hijacking of Belgian airliner Sabina Flight 571 en route to Tel Aviv, the mailing of dozens of letter bombs to Israeli embassies around the world, killing an Israeli official in Britain, and an attack on passengers at an airport in Athens that killed 3 and wounded more than 50. But it’s most infamous operation was the kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Olympic games.
A Black September terrorist looks over the balcony of the hotel room in Munich where 11 Israeli hostages are held, 1972.
Early on the morning of September 5, 1972, a team of eight Black September operatives entered the Olympic village in Munich, Germany. They had met with Fatah leader Abu Daoud the night before, receiving instructions for their operations, and were receiving financial and logistical support from at least two prominent neo-Nazi figures inside Germany. Armed with AK-47’s and grenades, they forced their way into two apartments occupied by Israeli athletes and coaches, murdering two who resisted and taking nine more hostage. By the morning of September 6th, the terrorists had communicated their demands to the press, including the release of a large number of Palestinian and non-Arab militants from Israeli prisons. Images of the masked terrorists on the balcony of the Israeli apartment became some of the most iconic images of the late twentieth century. The terrorists also demanded air transport for escape to an Arab country, promising the release of the hostages at the Munich airport. The terrorists drove themselves and the nine surviving hostages to airport tarmac in a vehicle provided by authorities, loading the hostages onto two helicopters, before German police staged a rescue operation which failed miserably. A team of German sharpshooters attempted to kill the terrorists before they could take off, but in the ensuing firefight, all nine Israeli hostages were executed by their captors. Five of the eight Black September operatives were killed and the remaining three arrested. It was a stunning tragedy which sent shock waves across the world, as the international press reported the airport siege live to their audiences. The three surviving terrorists would later be released and transferred to Libya in exchange for the hostages of yet another airliner hijacking.
In the aftermath of the Munich Massacre, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized Mossad operation Wrath of God, for which teams of agents was assembled to assassinate nine members of Black September and the greater PLO, including Ali Salameh and Abu Daoud. Nine were dead by the end of 1973, including several who were not on the original list. Salameh escaped several attempts on his life by Mossad due to warnings from the CIA, for which he was the primary PLO contact. He was finally assassinated in Lebanon in 1979. Abu Daoud survived being shot five times in an assassination attempt in the 1980’s before dying of liver disease in 2010.
By late 1973, the PLO had shuttered Black September and ordered its operatives to cease its activity outside of Israel and the Palestinian territories. However, the damage had been done. The Dawson’s Field hijackings and the Munich Massacre had permanently altered the trajectory of international terrorism, inspiring greater and deadlier terror attacks in the decades to come, such as the 9/11 hijackings and the terrorist infiltrations and kidnappings in Southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. The PLO’s retreat to Lebanon would also have major ramifications for that nation, as dissention between the different ethnic and religious factions in the tiny country to Israel’s north would lead to yet another conflict for the Jewish State in the 1980’s, continuing in some form to the present day.
Gabe Caligiuri is the editor of THE WIRE, as well as an occasional contributor to other FAI digital content on the subjects of history and geopolitics as they relate to the Great Commission. Gabe and his family live in California.
[1] This and subsequent Pacepa quotes regarding Arafat come from a 2003 Wall Stret Journal article available here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB106419296113226300
[2] As detailed by historian Robert S. Wistrich in his 2010 book A Lethal Obsession.
[3] Revealed in documents that were smuggled into the UK by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and published in his 2000 book with Christopher Andrew entitled The Sword and the Shield.